No wise man ever wished to be younger.

—Jonathan Swift

About Jonathan Swift

Portrait of Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish writer, essayist, satirist, and Anglican cleric. He was the author of the satirical prose novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) and the creator of the fictional island of Lilliput. He is regarded by many as the greatest satirist of the...

More quotations from Jonathan Swift

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

—Jonathan Swift

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.

—Jonathan Swift

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

—Jonathan Swift

honesty promises

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

—Jonathan Swift

I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.

—Jonathan Swift

More quotations tagged with “age”

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

—H. L. Mencken

I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.

—Bernard Baruch

humor perception age old age

We categorize everyone. We send the old here, the young there. We ship adolescents off to war. We send everyone to prison every day: the children to school, the parents to the office or the factory, the musicians to concert halls in the evening.

Don’t ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever were there, they are there still.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes