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Jonathan Swift: Quotations
| Swift’s Epitaph (written by himself): ‘Hic depositum est Corpus / IONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D. / Hujus Ecclesiae Cathedralis / Decani / Ubi saeva Indignatio / Ulterius / Cor lacerare nequit. / Abi Viator / Et imitare, si poteris, / Strenuum pro virili / Libertatis Vindicatorem / Obiit 190 Die Mensis Octobris / A.D. Anno Aetatis 78. [See note on source of saeva indignatio in Juvenal - under Notes, attached.] |
[See W. B. Yeats’s translation-version: ‘Swift has sailed into his rest; / Savage indignation there / Cannot lacerate his breast. / Imitate him if you dare, / World-besotted traveller; he / Served human liberty.’ (Coll. Poems, Macmillan 1950, p.277).]
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| See listing of works by Swift on Internet - attached. |
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| Note: The list of titles and their corresponding links will open in a separate window. The relevant sites and titles will open in separate windows also. |
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| Did Edmund Burke take his inspiration for ‘ten thousand swords’ from Jonathan Swift? See under Burke > Quotations - “Reflections on the French Revolution” - infra. |
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“Sweetness and Light”
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| Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869], ed. John Dover Wilson & F. A. Cavanagh (Cambridge UP 1932) - Notes, p.54: Battle of the Books ... sweetness and light: Arnold borrows more than the phrase “sweetness and light” from Swift. In the story Swift tells of the Bee and the Spider may be found the origin of Arnold’s distinction between the man of culture and the Philistine. The spider boasts of his web, for all the world like Bright boasting of the industrial prowess of England, ”I am a domestic animal, furnished with, a native stock within myself. This large castle (to show my improvements in the mathematics) is all built with my own hands, and the materials extracted altogether out of my own person.’ Whereupon the Bee asks “Whether is the nobler of the two, that which by a lazy contemplation of four inches round, by an overweening pride, feeding and engendering on itself, turns all into excrement and venom, producing nothing at all but flybane and cobweb; or that which by a universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax.” The Spider, as Aesop then points out, is the type of the moderns, the Bee of the ancients, who have “by infinite labour and search, and ranging through every corner of nature” filled their “hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.” [My italics: BS; 07.09.2019.] |
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| File 2 |
| The Drapier’s Letters (1724-25) |
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‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may be know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.’
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‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, and not enough to make us love one another.’
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‘[U]tterly rejecting and renouncing everything wearable that comes from England […] burn everything that came from England, except their People and their Coals.’
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‘For in Reason, all Government without the Consent of the Governed, is the very Definition of Slavery: But, in fact, Eleven Men well Armed will certainly subdue one Single Man in his Shirt.’
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‘Looking upon this world as absolutely desperate, I would not prescribe a dose to the dead.’
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‘It is a mistake of wise and good men that they expect more Reason and Virtue from human nature, than […] it is in any sort capable of.’ |
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