"I shall be like that tree-I shall..." - Quote by Jonathan Swift

“He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

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

“This single Stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected Corner, I once knew in a flourishing State in a Forest: It was full of Sap, full of Leaves, and full of Boughs: But now, in vain does the busy Art of Man pretend to vie with Nature, by tying that withered Bundle of Twigs to its sapless Trunk: It is at best but the Reverse of what it was; a Tree turned upside down, the Branches on the Earth, and the Root in the Air.”

“Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all, all shalldie.”

“An old man, broken with the storms of state,Is come to lay his weary bones among ye;Give him a little earth for charity!”

“One of my great goals in life is to live long enough to where I am in the pulpit, preaching my heart out, and I die on the spot, my chin hits the pulpit - boom! - and I'm down and out. What a way to die!”

“That strain again! It had a dying fall:O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet soundThat breathes upon a bank of violets,Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:'Tis not so sweet as it was before.”

“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”

“Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.”