Jonathan Swift

1667–1745 · Anglo-Irish satirist, cleric & poet

Jonathan Swift was the Dublin-born Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral and the age’s greatest prose satirist, author of Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal and A Tale of a Tub. He did write pointed aphorisms about money — his Thoughts on Various Subjects includes lines such as “No man will take counsel, but every man will take money.” This head-versus-heart maxim is one more of them — written not in an essay but in a 1729 letter to his friend Lord Bolingbroke.

Traced to source

3 quotes we’ve traced to Jonathan Swift

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

Verified

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another”

Verified

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others”

Disputed

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