Top 100 Joseph Addison Quotes
#1. Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor.
Joseph Addison
#2. Conspiracies no sooner should be formed Than executed.
Joseph Addison
#3. There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.
Joseph Addison
#4. A money-lender
he serves you in the present tense; he lends you in the conditional mood; keeps you in the conjunctive; and ruins you in the future.
Joseph Addison
#5. True modesty avoids everything that is criminal; false modesty everything that is unfashionable.
Joseph Addison
#6. Men naturally warm and heady are transported with the greatest flush of good-nature.
Joseph Addison
#7. I would have every zealous man examine his heart thoroughly, and I believe he will often find that what be calls a zeal for his religion is either pride, interest, or ill-repute.
Joseph Addison
#8. Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Joseph Addison
#9. Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.
Joseph Addison
#10. Faith is kept alive in us, and gathers strength, more from practice than from speculations.
Joseph Addison
#11. Courage that grows from constitution often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; courage which arises from a sense of duty acts; in a uniform manner.
Joseph Addison
#13. A few persons of an odious and despised country could not have filled the world with believers, had they not shown undoubted credentials from the divine person who sent them on such a message.
Joseph Addison
#15. Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species.
Joseph Addison
#16. Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow of a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the violence of torrents, nor demolished by the force of armies.
Joseph Addison
#17. A well regulated commerce is not, like law, physic, or divinity, to be overstocked with hands; but, on the contrary, flourishes by multitudes, and gives employment to all its professors.
Joseph Addison
#18. God discovers the martyr and confessor without the trial of flames and tortures, and will hereafter entitle many to the reward of actions which they had never the opportunity of performing.
Joseph Addison
#19. From social intercourse are derived some of the highest enjoyments of life; where there is a free interchange of sentiments the mind acquires new ideas, and by frequent exercise of its powers, the understanding gains fresh vigor.
Joseph Addison
#20. How is it possible for those who are men of honor in their persons, thus to become notorious liars in their party
Joseph Addison
#21. Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion.
Joseph Addison
#23. If ridicule were employed to laugh men out of vice and folly, it might be of some use.
Joseph Addison
#24. There is nothing in which men more deceive themselves than in what they call zeal.
Joseph Addison
#25. Whether dark presages of the night proceed from any latent power of the soul during her abstraction, or from any operation of subordinate spirits, has been a dispute.
Joseph Addison
#26. Though we seem grieved at the shortness of life in general, we are wishing every period of it at an end. The minor longs to be at age, then to be a man of business, then to make up an estate, then to arrive at honors, then to retire.
Joseph Addison
#28. There is no passion that is not finely expressed in those parts of the inspired writings which are proper for divine songs and anthems.
Joseph Addison
#29. Nothing, says Longinus, can be great, the contempt of which is great.
Joseph Addison
#30. A man with great talents, but void of discretion, is like Polyphemus in the fable, strong and blind, endued with an irresistible force, which for want of sight is of no use to him.
Joseph Addison
#31. There is nothing which one regards so much with an eye of mirth and pity as innocence when it has in it a dash of folly.
Joseph Addison
#32. When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations.
Joseph Addison
#33. There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former.
Joseph Addison
#34. Nothing that isn't a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconsistency.
Joseph Addison
#35. A cheerful temper, joined with innocence will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good-natured.
Joseph Addison
#36. The friendships of the world are oft confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasures.
Joseph Addison
#37. No man writes a book without meaning something, though he may not have the faculty of writing consequentially and expressing his meaning.
Joseph Addison
#38. The unassuming youth seeking instruction with humility gains good fortune.
Joseph Addison
#39. Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition.
Joseph Addison
#40. The pride of woman, natural to her, never sleeps until modesty is gone.
Joseph Addison
#41. Women were formed to temper Mankind, and sooth them into Tenderness and Compassion; not to set an Edge upon their Minds, and blowup in them those Passions which are too apt to rise of their own Accord.
Joseph Addison
#42. Though a man cannot abstain from being weak, he may from being vicious.
Joseph Addison
#43. But there is nothing that makes its way more directly to the Soul than Beauty, which immediately diffuses a secret satisfaction and complacency through the imagination, and gives a finishing to any thing that is Great or Uncommon.
Joseph Addison
#44. The gods in bounty work up storms about us, that give mankind occasion to exert their hidden strength and throw out into practice virtues that shun the day, and lie concealed in the smooth seasons and the calms of life.
Joseph Addison
#45. The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight.
Joseph Addison
#46. Should a writer single out and point his raillery at particular persons, or satirize the miserable, he might be sure of pleasing a great part of his readers, but must be a very ill man if he could please himself.
Joseph Addison
#47. A jealous man is very quick in his application: he knows how to find a double edge in an invective, and to draw a satire on himself out of a panegyrick on another.
Joseph Addison
#48. In England we see people lulled sleep with solid and elaborate discourses of piety, who would be warmed and transported out of themselves by the bellowings and distortions of enthusiasm.
Joseph Addison
#49. Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth.
Joseph Addison
#50. The pleasantest part of a man's life is generally that which passes in courtship, provided his passion be sincere, and the party beloved kind with discretion. Love, desire, hope, all the pleasing emotions of the soul, rise in the pursuit.
Joseph Addison
#51. Whether zeal or moderation be the point we aim at, let us keep the fire out of the one, and the frost out of the other.
Joseph Addison
#52. The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out of a proper method to catch the reader's eye; without which, a good thing may pass over unobserved, or lost among commissions of bankrupt.
Joseph Addison
#53. The memory is perpetually looking back when we have nothing present to entertain us. It is like those repositories in animals that are filled with food, on which they may ruminate when their present pastures fail.
Joseph Addison
#54. A reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black man or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor.
Joseph Addison
#55. There is nobody so weak of invention that cannot make some little stories to villify his enemy.
Joseph Addison
#56. Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.
Joseph Addison
#57. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Joseph Addison
#58. O ye powers that search The heart of man, and weigh his inmost thoughts, If I have done amiss, impute it not! The best may err, but you are good.
Joseph Addison
#59. If men of eminence are exposed to censure on one hand, they are as much liable to flattery on the other. If they receive reproaches which are not due to them, they likewise receive praises which they do not deserve.
Joseph Addison
#60. If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother and hope your guardian genius.
Joseph Addison
#61. Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.
Joseph Addison
#62. The first race of mankind used to dispute, as our ordinary people do now-a-days, in a kind of wild logic, uncultivated by rule of art.
Joseph Addison
#63. The talent of turning men into ridicule, and exposing to laughter those one converses with, is the qualification of little ungenerous tempers.
Joseph Addison
#65. The voice of reason is more to be regarded than the bent of any present inclination; since inclination will at length come over to reason, though we can never force reason to comply with inclination.
Joseph Addison
#67. Nothing is more amiable than true modesty, and nothing more contemptible than the false. The one guards virtue, the other betrays it.
Joseph Addison
#68. There is no greater sign of a bad cause, than when the patrons of it are reduced to the necessity of making use of the most wicked artifices to support it.
Joseph Addison
#69. Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood.
Joseph Addison
#70. Reading is to the mind what exerise is to the body.
Joseph Addison
#71. Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!
Joseph Addison
#72. The gloomy months of November, when the people of England hang and drown themselves.
Joseph Addison
#74. It is odd to consider the connection between despotism and barbarity, and how the making one person more than man makes the rest less.
Joseph Addison
#75. Should the whole frame of nature round him break,
In ruin and confusion hurled,
He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack,
And stand secure amidst a falling world.
Joseph Addison
#76. We cannot be guilty of a greater act of uncharitableness, than to interpret the afflictions which befall our neighbors as punishments and judgments.
Joseph Addison
#77. Every passion gives a particular cast to the countenance, and is apt to discover itself in some feature or other. I have seen an eye curse for half an hour together, and an eyebrow call a man a scoundrel.
Joseph Addison
#78. Artificial intelligence will never be a match for natural stupidity.
Joseph Addison
#79. There is not a more pleasante exercise of the mind than gratitude.
Joseph Addison
#80. Who rant by note, and through the gamut rage; in songs and airs express their martial fire; combat in trills, and in a fugue expire.
Joseph Addison
#81. One should take good care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life as laughter.
Joseph Addison
#82. Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful.
Joseph Addison
#83. Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.
Joseph Addison
#84. Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station.
Joseph Addison
#85. The very first discovery of beauty strikes the mind with an inward joy, and spreads a cheerfulness and delight through all its faculties.
Joseph Addison
#86. Cunning is only the mimic of discretion, and may pass upon weak men in the same manner as vivacity is often mistaken for wit, and gravity for wisdom.
Joseph Addison
#87. Mankind are more indebted to industry than ingenuity; the gods set up their favors at a price, and industry is the purchaser.
Joseph Addison
#88. Music religious heat inspires, It wakes the soul, and lifts it high, And wings it with sublime desires, And fits it to bespeak the Deity.
Joseph Addison
#89. There is sometimes a greater judgement shewn in deviating from the rules of art, than in adhering to them; and?there ismore beauty inthe works of a great genius who is ignorant of all the rules of art, than in the works of a little genius, who not only knows but scrupulously observes them.
Joseph Addison
#90. Why will any man be so impertinently officious as to tell me all prospect of a future state is only fancy and delusion? Is there any merit in being the messenger of ill news. If it is a dream, let me enjoy it, since it makes me both the happier and better man.
Joseph Addison
#92. Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part of life.
Joseph Addison
#93. I have often wondered that learning is not thought a proper ingredient in the education of a woman of quality or fortune. Since they have the same improvable minds as the male part of their species.
Joseph Addison
#94. Quick sensitivity is inseperable from a ready understanding.
Joseph Addison
#95. Beauty commonly produces love, but cleanliness preserves it. Age itself is not unamiable while it is preserved clean and unsullied; like a piece of metal constantly kept smooth and bright, we look on it with more pleasure than on a new vessel cankered with rust.
Joseph Addison
#97. Contentment produces, in some measure, all those effects which the alchemist usually ascribes to what he calls the philosopher's stone; and if it does not bring riches, it does the same thing by banishing the desire for them.
Joseph Addison
#98. It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.
Joseph Addison
#99. There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.
Joseph Addison
#100. It is folly to seek the approbation of any being besides the Supreme.
Joseph Addison
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