"THOUGHTS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS"

I Stole Jonathan Swift's Words From Here


We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice, when they will not so much as take warning?

All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year’s revenue.

The latter part of a wise man’s life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Æneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors.

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

The greatest inventions were produced in the times of ignorance, as the use of the compass, gunpowder, and printing, and by the dullest nation, as the Germans.

It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. Future ages shall talk of this; this shall be famous to all posterity. Whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.

Some men, under the notions of weeding out prejudices, eradicate virtue, honesty, and religion.

I have known some men possessed of good qualities, which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves; like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!

The reason why so few marriages are happy, is, because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.

Law, in a free country, is, or ought to be, the determination of the majority of those who have property in land.

Every man desires to live long; but no man would be old.

If books and laws continue to increase as they have done for fifty years past, I am in some concern for future ages how any man will be learned, or any man a lawyer.


-Jonathan Swift
1667-1745