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'Gulliver's Travels' Quotes

Jonathan Swift's Famous Novel

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Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels

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  • "For the Queen (who had indeed but a weak stomach) took up at one mouthful as much as a dozen English farmers could eat at a meal, which to me was for some time a very nauseous sight. She would craunch the wing of a lark, bones and all, between her teeth, although it were nine times as large as that of a full-grown turkey; and put a bit of break in her mouth, as big as two twelve-penny loaves. She drank out of a golden cup, above a hogshead at a draught. Her knives were twice a long as a scythe set straight upon the handle. The spoons, forks, and other instruments were all in the same proportion."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 2, Ch. 3

  • "There was a woman with a cancer in her breast, swelled to a monstrous size, full of holes, in two or three of which I could have easily crept, and covered my whole body. There was a fellow with a wen in his neck, larger than five woolpacks, and another with a couple of wooden legs, each about twenty foot high. But, the most hateful sight of all was the lice crawling on their clothes. I could see distinctly the limbs of these vermin with my naked eyes, much better than those of an European louse through a microscope, and their snouts with which they rooted like swine."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 2, Ch. 4

  • "This made me reflect how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor doing himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him. And yet I have seen the moral of my own behavior very frequent in England since my return, where a little contemptible varlet, without the least title to birth, person, wit, or common sense, shall presume to look with importance, and put himself upon a foot with the greatest persons of the kingdom."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 2, Ch. 5

  • "Imagine with thyself, courteous reader, how often I then wished for the tongue of Demosthenes or Cicero, that might have enabled me to celebrate the praises of my own dear native country in a style equal to its merits and felicity."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 2, Ch. 6

  • "My little friend Grildrig; you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country. You have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator. That laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in it original might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 2, Ch. 6

  • "The want of which knowledge will ever produce many prejudices, and a certain narrowness of thinking, from which we and the politer countries of Europe are wholly exempted."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 2, Ch. 7

  • "That my story could contain little besides common events, without those ornamental descriptions of strange plants, trees, birds, and other animals, or the barbarous customs and idolatry of savage people, with which most writers abound."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 2, Ch. 8

  • "When I came to my own house, for which I was forced to enquire, one of the servants opening the door, I bent down to go in (like a goose under a gate) for fear of striking my head. My wife ran out to embrace me, but I stooped lower than her knees, thinking she could otherwise never be able to reach my mouth. My daughter kneeled to ask me blessing, but I could not see her till she arose, having been so long used to stand with my head an eyes erect to above sixty foot; and then I went to take her up with one hand, by the waist. I looked down upon the servants and one or two friends who were in the house, as if they had been pygmies, and I a giant."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 2, Ch. 8

  • "They made signs for me to come down from the rock, and go towards the shore, which I accordingly did; and the flying island being raised to a convenient height, the verge directly over me, a chain was let down from the lowest gallery, with a seat fastened to the bottom, to which I fixed myself, and was drawn up by pulleys."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 3, Ch. 1

  • "Their heads were all reclined either to the right, or the left; one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to the zenith. Their outward garments were adorned with the figures of suns, moons, and stars, interwoven with those of fiddles, flutes, harps, trumpets, guitars, harpsichords, and many more instruments of music, unknown to us in Europe. I observed here and there many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder fastened like a flail to the end of a short stick, which they carried in their hands. In each bladder was a small quantity of dried pease or little pebbles (as I was afterwards informed). With these bladders they now and then flapped the mouths and ears of those who stood near them, of which practice I could not then conceive the meaning; it seems, the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither an speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 3, Ch. 2

  • "I did not discover any good effects they produced; but on the contrary, I never knew a soil so unhappily cultivated, houses so ill contrived and so ruinous, or a people whose countenances and habit expressed so much misery and want."
    - Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 3, Ch. 4

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