The first springs of great events like those of great rivers are often mean and little.
Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.
They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's...
Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.
We are so fond of each other because our ailments are the same.
Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
Very few men properly speaking live at present but are providing to live another time.
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.
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
I was in the utmost astonishment, and roared so loud that they all ran back in a fright; and some of them, as I was afterwards told, were hurt with the falls they got by leaping from my sides upon the...
Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.
A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
My little friend Grildrig; you have made a most admirable panegyrick upon your country. You have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislat...
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 v...
There was all the world and his wife.
Take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs; because men...
Gulliver describes a royal personage inspiring awe among the tiny Lilliputians because he was taller than his brethren by the breadth of a human fingernail.
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 power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
Some time after, asking a friend at court how they came to fix on that determinate number, he told me that his majesty’s mathematicians, having taken the height of my body by the help of a quadrant, a...