''Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting'' is the title of a satirical essay by

Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dubl ...

. It also has appeared under the title ''Thoughts on Various Subjects''. It consists of a series of short

epigrams An epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word is derived from the Greek "inscription" from "to write on, to inscribe", and the literary device has been employed for over two millen ...

apothegm An adage (; Latin: adagium) is a memorable and usually philosophical aphorism that communicates an important truth derived from experience, custom, or both, and that many people consider true and credible because of its longeval tradition, i.e. ...

s with no particular connections between them. It contains the quotation "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him," the source for the title of the 1980 book ''

A Confederacy of Dunces ''A Confederacy of Dunces'' is a picaresque novel by American novelist John Kennedy Toole which reached publication in 1980, eleven years after Toole's death. Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who also contributed a foreword) ...

'' by

John Kennedy Toole John Kennedy Toole (; December 17, 1937 – March 26, 1969) was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana whose posthumously published novel, ''A Confederacy of Dunces'', won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981; he also wrote '' The N ...

. Other well-known quotes include: *"The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former." *"Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors." *"When a man is made a spiritual peer he loses his surname; when a temporal, his Christian name." *"If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!" *"What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly: that they neither marry, nor are given in marriage."

External links

* . Satirical works Year of work missing Essays by Jonathan Swift {{essay-stub