Jonathan Swift

"Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived."

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food."

"In a pair of fashionable shoes, I have discovered the philosophers' stone."

"It takes forty years to discover the truth about life, and sixty more to accept it."

"Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through."

"Men are happy when they are unhappy? No. Men are happy when they have work that suits them."

"Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable."

"One man's constant is another man's chaos."

"Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions."

"Praise is the surface money of the world."

"Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken."

"A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people."

"The best investment is in the tools of one's own trade."

"The question is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure."

"The shrewdest apes which ever lived in the Tower were not able to tell their right hand from their left."

"The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them."

"There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy."

"These are the times that try men's souls."

"They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps."

"This is the first precept of the law, that one supreme being called the prime mover, of all things, and consequently the first cause."

"Time is money."

"Tis an old observation that the errors of the learned are the seeds of the errors of the vulgar."

"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain always a child."

"To hear an honest man speak the truth is like an antidote to poison."

"To steal a horse a man is called a thief, but he who steals from the public treasury is called a statesman."

"Torture is a proof of the law's uncertainty."

"True friendship is a plant of slow growth."

"We are all born mad. Some remain so."

"We are all sleeping while others wage war for us."

"We are better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."