"If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them."

"Giant and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot him. Some of this audience mayn't have read the last part of Gulliver, and to such I would recall the advice of the venerable Mr. Punch to persons about to marry, and say, 'Don't'. When Gulliver first lands among the Yahoos, the naked howling wretches clamber up trees and assault him, and he describes himself as 'almost stifled with the filth which fell about him.' The reader of the fourth part of Gulliver's Travels is like the hero himself in this instance. It is Yahoo language: a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind — tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene."

"No wise man ever wished to be younger."

"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."

"The Bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking."

"He is taller by almost the breadth of my nail, than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders."

"So geographers, in Afric maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns."

"Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping."

"Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold, which the owner knows not of."

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

"Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions, and consequently of no use to a good king or a good ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics."

"Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and orators, because he that would obtrude his thoughts and reasons upon a multitude, will convince others the more, as he appears convinced himself."

"Men are contented to be laughed at for their wit, but not for their folly."

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

"The Stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes."

"What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly: that they neither marry, nor are given in marriage."

"The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit."

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

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

"A nice man is a man of nasty ideas."

"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."

"Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age…"

"Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension."

"Books, the children of the brain."

"I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells - a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there: and often when there is nothing in the world at the bottom besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and a-half under-ground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep upon no wiser reason than because it is wondrous dark"

"As boys do sparrows, with flinging salt upon their tails."

"There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentence is printed in a different character, shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either of wit or sublime."

"Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship."

"Bread is the staff of life."

"He made it a part of his religion never to say grace to his meat."