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Jonathan Swift quotes, quotations, sayings

May your camel be as swift as the wind.
 1004    
Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
If the mass of people hesitate to act, strike with swiftly and with boldness, the brave heart that understands and seizes opportunity can everything.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.
Jonathan Swift
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I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, who has sight so keen and strong That it can follow the flight of song? Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroken; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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The most positive men are the most credulous.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
Real good breeding, as the people have it here, is one of the finest things now going in the world. The careful avoidance of all discussion, the swift hopping from topic to topic, does not agree with me; but the graceful style they do it with is beyond that of minuets!
Thomas Carlyle
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A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
May you live every day of your life.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
Argument is the worst sort of conversation.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses; which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
O mischief, thou art swift to enter in the thoughts of desperate men!
William Shakespeare
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Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.
Marcel Proust
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In the defense of our nation, a president must be a clear-eyed realist. There are limits to the smiles and scowls of diplomacy. Armies and missiles are not stopped by stiff notes of condemnation. They are held in check by strength and purpose and the promise of swift punishment.
George W. Bush, speech, November 19, 1999
 1004    
Two friendships in two breasts requires The same aversions and desires.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
Some people take more care to hide their wisdom than their folly.
Jonathan Swift
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Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
Active minds that think and study, Like swift brooks are seldom muddy.
Arthur Guiterman
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Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain
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But they for whom I am the supreme goal, who do all work renouncing self for me and meditate on me with single-hearted devotion, these I will swiftly rescue from death's vast sea, for their consciousness has entered into me.
Bhagavad Gita
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Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
Youth, with swift feet, walks onward in the way; the land of joy lies all before his eyes.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
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We who have lived before railways were made belong to another world. It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armor, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth -- all these belong to the old period. But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one. We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.
William M. Thackeray
 1004    
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. [Ecclesiastes 9:11]
Bible
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Life is short. Be swift to love! Make haste to be kind!-Henri Frederic Amiel
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Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
Henri Frdric Amiel
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As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
Jonathan Swift
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Nothing is swifter than our years.
Ovid
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Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
John F. Kennedy
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Like swift water an active mind never stagnates.
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Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.
Bible
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Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well-deceived.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.
Jonathan Swift
 1004    
Life has been compared to a race, but the allusion improves by observing, that the most swift are usually the least manageable and the most likely to stray from the course. Great abilities have always been less serviceable to the possessors than moderate ones.
Oliver Goldsmith
 1004    
At the moment of death there will appear to you, swifter than lightning, the luminous splendor of the colorless light of emptiness, and that will surround you on all sides. Terrified, you will flee from the radiance. Try to submerge it is an obstacle blocking the path of liberation. yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self, all attachment to your illusory ego. Recognize that the boundless light of this true reality is your own true self, and you shall be saved!
Tibetan
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You can do what you want to do, accomplish what you want to accomplish, attain any reasonable objective you may have in mind -- not all of a sudden, perhaps not in one swift and sweeping act of achievement -- but you can do it gradually, day by day and play by play, if you want to do it, if you work to do it, over a sufficiently long period of time.
William E. Holler
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The swift wind of compromise is a lot more devastating than the sudden jolt of misfortune.
Charles Swindoll
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I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
Jonathan Swift
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