Joseph Addison Quotes

One should take good care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life as laughter.

Men naturally warm and heady are transported with the greatest flush of good-nature.

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.

Advertisements are of great use to the vulgar. First of all, as they are instruments of ambition. A man that is by no means big enough for the Gazette, may easily creep into the advertisements; by which means we often see an apothecary in the same paper of news with a plenipotentiary, or a running footman with an ambassador.

Riches are apt to betray a man into arrogance.

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.

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.

An honest private man often grows cruel and abandoned when converted into an absolute prince. Give a man power of doing what he pleases with impunity, you extinguish his fear, and consequently overturn in him one of the great pillars of morality.

Love, anger, pride and avarice all visibly move in those little orbs.

The gloomy months of November, when the people of England hang and drown themselves.

The greatest sweetener of human life is friendship.

Others proclaim the infirmities of a great man with satisfaction and complacence, if they discover none of the like in themselves.

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.

We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.

Nothing lies on our hands with such uneasiness as time. Wretched and thoughtless creatures! In the only place where covetousness were a virtue we turn prodigals.

The ungrown glories of his beamy hair.

The most exquisite words and finest strokes of an author are those which very often appear the most doubtful and exceptionable to a man who wants a relish for polite learning; and they are those which a sour undistinguishing critic generally attacks with the greatest violence.

It generally takes its rise either from an ill-will to mankind, a private inclination to make ourselves esteemed, an ostentation of wit, and vanity of being thought in the secrets of the world; or from a desire of gratifying any of these dispositions of mind in those persons with whom we converse.

My heart leaps at the trumpet's voice.

Female Virtues are of a Domestick turn. The Family is the proper Province for Private Women to Shine in. If they must be showing their Zeal for the Publick, let it not be against those who are perhaps of the same Family, or at least of the same Religion or Nation, but against those who are the open, professed, undoubted Enemies of their Faith, Liberty, and Country.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

To be perfectly just is an attribute of the divine nature; to be so to the utmost of our abilities, is the glory of man.

Marriage enlarges the Scene of our Happiness and Miseries.

It happened very providentially, to the honor of the Christian religion, that it did not take its rise in the dark illiterate ages of the world, but at a time when arts and sciences were at their height.

As Vivacity is the Gift of Women, Gravity is that of Men.

Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature.

We cannot be guilty of a greater act of uncharitableness, than to interpret the afflictions which befall our neighbors as punishments and judgments.

To look upon the soul as going on from strength to strength, to consider that she is to shine forever with new accessions of glory, and brighten to all eternity; that she will be still adding virtue to virtue, and knowledge to knowledge,--carries in it something wonderfully agreeable to that ambition which is natural to the mind of man.

The man who lives by hope, will die by hunger.

In the loss of an object we do not proportion our grief to the real value it bears, but to the value our fancies set upon it.

As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.

Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion.

Most of our fellow-subjects are guided either by the prejudice of education or by a deference to the judgment of those who perhaps in their own hearts disapprove the opinions which they industriously spread among the multitude.

A man improves more by reading the story of a person eminent for prudence and virtue, than by the finest rules and precepts of morality.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

When a man becomes familiar with his goddess, she quickly sinks into a woman.

One may know a man that never conversed in the world, by his excess of good-breeding.

Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.

There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.

Charity is the perfection and ornament of religion.

I have often thought, says Sir Roger, it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the middle of Winter.

There is noting truly valuable which can be purchased without pains and labor. The gods have set a price upon every real and noble pleasure.

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.

There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good-nature, or something which must bear its appearance and supply its place. For this reason mankind have been forced to invent a kind of artificial humanity, which is what we express by the word Good-Breeding.

Mankind are more indebted to industry than ingenuity; the gods set up their favors at a price, and industry is the purchaser.

I think a Person who is thus terrified with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable, than one who contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless.

It is pleasant to see a notorious profligate seized with a concern for religion, and converting his spleen into zeal.

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.