Jonathan Swift Biography Quotes 62 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin on November 30, 1667, into the precarious Anglo-Irish Protestant world that would later supply both his privileges and his grievances. His father, also Jonathan Swift, a steward for the King's Inns, died before the child was born, leaving the family dependent on relatives and small stipends. That early exposure to dependency and patronage - the sense that life could be decided by other people's favor - hardened into the watchful, easily wounded pride that friends later mistook for mere misanthropy.

He grew up between Irish realities and English expectations, a cultural double vision that never left him. Ireland was not, for Swift, a picturesque periphery but a field of legal and economic extraction, and he absorbed the daily humiliations of a colonial society run for distant interests. In his adulthood he would turn this experience into political energy, casting himself as both insider and outsider: a clergyman of the established church who spoke like a citizen against the established order.

Education and Formative Influences
Swift studied at Trinity College, Dublin, earning a BA in 1686, though the record suggests an uneven student with flashes of brilliance and impatience with routine. The Glorious Revolution unsettled Ireland, and in 1689 he went to England, entering the household of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Surrey, as secretary and dependent. There he encountered the literate polish and power-adjacent caution of Restoration politics, began writing seriously, and met Esther Johnson ("Stella"), whose presence shaped his emotional life for decades. Temple's library and conversations trained Swift in classical models and modern statecraft, while the humiliations of service sharpened his eye for hypocrisy and his desire to matter on public, not merely private, terms.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
Ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1695, Swift moved between minor clerical posts and Temple's orbit until Temple's death (1699) forced him to seek advancement through writing and party alliance. His early satires - including "A Tale of a Tub" (1704) and "The Battle of the Books" (1704) - announced a voice at once learned and abrasive, capable of turning doctrinal disputes and literary quarrels into anatomy lessons of human vanity. In London he became a leading Tory polemicist, writing "The Conduct of the Allies" (1711) and editing "The Examiner", then fell with the Tory collapse in 1714, returning to Ireland as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. There, the local office became a national platform: the "Drapier's Letters" (1724) rallied Ireland against Wood's halfpence, and "A Modest Proposal" (1729) fused moral rage with icy arithmetic. His greatest fiction, "Gulliver's Travels" (1726), made travel narrative into a laboratory for political reason, bodily disgust, and philosophical despair. In later life he endured vertigo and hearing loss (likely Meniere's disease), periods of depressive darkness, and a final cognitive decline; he died in Dublin on October 19, 1745, leaving much of his estate to found St Patrick's Hospital for the mentally ill.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Swift distrusted abstractions that floated above lived consequences. He believed that institutions advertised as neutral - law, commerce, polite opinion - often served the strong against the weak, and his satire works by making that service visible. "Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through". The line is not a decorative cynicism; it is the emotional motor of his Irish writings, where he watched ordinary people punished while well-placed offenders slipped free. His political imagination was therefore intensely moral, but rarely sentimental: he preferred to shame vice by showing its mechanisms, not by preaching at its surface.

His style is a weapon disguised as plain speech. Swift tightens prose until it feels like common sense, then turns the screw so that common sense becomes indictment. He understood how the metropolis could confuse noise with authority, warning that "It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom". That suspicion of fashionable consensus coexisted with a private discipline about desire and self-command - "A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart". - a creed that reads like autobiography from a man who knew patronage, feared dependence, and tried to keep ambition from corrupting his affections. Even when he seems to hate humanity, the closer truth is that he hated self-deception, including his own, and used disgust as a moral alarm bell.

Legacy and Influence
Swift endures as one of the central prose stylists of English and the defining satirist of the long 18th century, shaping later writers from Voltaire and Pope's successors to Orwell and modern political comedians who borrow his method of literalizing cruelty until it becomes undeniable. His Irish interventions helped model a civic nationalism rooted in economic justice rather than romantic myth, while his fiction remains a proving ground for debates about empire, rationalism, and the limits of enlightened reform. The darkness of his later years has also made him a biographical touchstone for the costs of sustained indignation - yet his work survives precisely because it refuses consolation, insisting that moral clarity begins where comforting stories end.

Our collection contains 62 quotes who is written by Jonathan, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice - Friendship.

Other people realated to Jonathan: Robert Walpole (Statesman), Carl Clinton Van Doren (Critic), Michael Foot (Politician), Matthew Green (Poet), Eustace Budgell (Writer), Leslie Stephen (Author), Francis Atterbury (Politician)

• 1729 A Modest Proposal (Essay)
• 1726 Gulliver's Travels (Novel)
• 1724 The Drapier's Letters (Series of Pamphlets)
• 1710 A Journal to Stella (Epistolary Novel)
• 1704 A Tale of a Tub (Satire)

• Wikipedia