Jonathan Swift

He made it a part of his religion never to say grace to his meat.

As boys do sparrows, with flinging salt upon their tails.

Books, the children of the brain.

Bread is the staff of life.

There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is couched …

Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.

It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted title to the first.

but the chief end I propose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it

I 've often wish'd that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year; A handsome house to lodge a friend; A river at my garden's end; A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land set out to plant a wood.

Hail fellow, well met.

Reason is a very light rider and easily shook off.

I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top.

Violent zeal for truth hath an hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride.

It is impossible that any thing so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.

Nothing is so great an instance of ill manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; if you flatter only one or two, you affront the rest.

I can discover no political evil in suffering bullies, sharpers, and rakes, to rid the world of each other by a method of their own; where the law hath not been able to find an expedient.

Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.

Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred in the company.

Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest. Give him always of the prime, And but little at a time. Carve to all but just enough,

Then gave him some familiar Thumps, A College Joke to cure the Dumps.

Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.

Yet malice never was his aim; He lashed the vice but spared the name. No individual could resent, Where thousands equally were meant. His satire points at no defect But what all mortals may correct;

A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, …