in Quotes & Aphorisms (Job)
Such an aversion and contempt for all manner of innovators as physicians are apt to have for empirics, or lawyers for pettifoggers.
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Aphorisms by Jonathan Swift
in Quotes & Aphorisms (Poetry)
Poets, although not insensible how much our language was already over-stocked with monosyllables, yet, to save time and pains, introduced that barbarous custom of abbreviating words to fit them to the measure of their verses.
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All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; 'tis like spending this year part of the next year's revenue.
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This disposition to shorten our words, by retrenching the vowels, is nothing else but a tendency to lapse into the barbarity of those northern nations from whom we are descended, and whose languages all labour under the same defect.
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The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
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The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter, and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.
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I could produce innumerable instances from my own observation of events imputed to the profound skill and address of a minister, which, in reality, were either mere effects of negligence, weakness, humour, passion, or pride; or at best, but the natural course of things left to themselves.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Enemy)
States call in foreigners to assist them against a common enemy; but the mischief was, these allies would never allow that the common enemy was subdued.
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The constant design of both these orators in all their speeches was to drive some one particular point.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the evil that a man can be guilty of.
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