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About this quote

What does it mean?
Swift satirizes futile scientific projects by describing someone spending years trying to extract sunlight from cucumbers.
In plain terms
He mocks wasting time on impossible or useless scientific ideas.
What can you take from it?
Not all scientific curiosity leads to useful results.

Where it applies

  • research proposals
  • academic critiques
  • bureaucratic funding

Putting it to work

  • evaluate practical value of projects
  • avoid vanity research

Questions to consider

  • How do we distinguish curiosity from futility?
  • When is it okay to pursue impractical ideas?

Another view

Some seemingly absurd experiments have led to unexpected discoveries.

More from Jonathan Swift

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  2. I said the thing which was not. (For they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood.)

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  3. I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of th…

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