- Books, the children of the brain.
- Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
- Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.
- It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
- The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
- It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
- Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
- The most positive men are the most credulous.
- The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
- Anyone who loves either the law or sausages should not see either being made.
- [on flattery] 'Tis an old maxim in the schools that flattery's the food of fools; yet now and then your men of wit will condescend to take a bit.
- [on flattery] 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 all the rest.
- Gossip is what some invent and others enlarge.
- Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
- When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
- [Gulliver] As I studied History I was struck by how many inconsequential men were elevated to great power and responsibility, and how many times momentous events hinged on mere accident.
- Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
- You cannot reason a man out of a position he wasn't reasoned into in the first place.
- Burn everything that comes from England except their people and their coal.
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