Jonathan Swift Age Quotations

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.

When men grow virtuous in their old age, they are merely making a sacrifice to God of the Devil's leavings

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them.

The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age; but that of a good one will not reform it.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

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

Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.

Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.

In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.

Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.

I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours.

Everyone desires long life, not one old age.

What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.

Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.

By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.