Joseph Addison Quotes

519 Sourced Quotes

Gifts and alms are the expressions, not the essence, of this virtue.

Joseph Addison
Great souls by instinct to each other turn,
Demand alliance, and in friendship burn;
A sudden friendship, while with stretched-out rays
They meet each other, mingling blaze with blaze.
Polished in courts, and hardened in the field,
Renowned for conquest, and in council skilled,
Their courage dwells not in a troubled flood
Of mounting spirits, and fermenting blood:
Lodged in the soul, with virtue overruled,
Inflamed by reason, and by reason cooled,
In hours of peace content to be unknown.
And only in the field of battle shown:
To souls like these, in mutual friendship joined,
Heaven dares intrust the cause of humankind.

Joseph Addison
The passion for praise, which is so very vehement in the fair sex, produces excellent effects in women of sense, who desire to be admired for that which only deserves admiration.

Joseph Addison
Waning moons their settled periods keep, to swell the billows and ferment the deep.

Joseph Addison
To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.

Joseph Addison
Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense; there are forty men of wit for one man of good sense; and he that will carry nothing about with him but gold, will be every day at a loss for readier change.

Joseph Addison
Death only closes a Man's Reputation, and determines it as good or bad.

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

Joseph Addison
A virtuous mind in a fair body is indeed a fine picture in a good light, and therefore it is no wonder that it makes the beautiful sex all aver charms.

Joseph Addison
There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude. It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance.

Joseph Addison
Though a man has all other perfections, and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life.

Joseph Addison
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.

Joseph Addison
Guard thy heart on this weak side, where most our nature fails.

Joseph Addison
Cunning has only private selfish aims, and sticks at nothing which may make them succeed. Discretion has large and extended views, and, like a well-formed eye, commands a whole horizon; cunning is a kind of short-sightedness, that discovers the minutest objects which are near at hand, but is not able to discern things at a distance.

Joseph Addison
He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

Joseph Addison
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
Fables take off from the severity of instruction, and enforce it at the same time that they conceal it.

Joseph Addison
I consider a human soul without education like marble in the quarry, which shows none of its inherent beauties until the skill of the polisher fetches out the colors and makes the surface shine.

Joseph Addison
The soul, considered with its Creator, is like one of those mathematical lines that may draw nearer to another for all eternity without a possibility of touching it; and can there be a thought so transporting as to consider ourselves in these perpetual approaches to Him, who is not only the standard of perfection, but of happiness?

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

Joseph Addison
As vivacity is the gift of women, gravity is that of men.

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

Joseph Addison
Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Joseph Addison
Learning, like traveling and all other methods of improvement, as it finishes good sense, so it makes a silly man ten thousand times more insufferable by supplying variety of matter to his impertinence, and giving him an opportunity of abounding in absurdities.

Joseph Addison
In that disputable point of persecuting men for conscience sake, I see such dreadful consequences rising, I would be as fully convinced of the truth of it as a mathematical demonstration, before I would venture to act upon it or make it a part of my religion.

Joseph Addison
Eternity, thou pleasing dreadful Thought!
Thro' what variety of untry'd beings,
Thro' what new scenes and changes must we pass?
The wide, the unbounded Prospect lies before me;
But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it.

Joseph Addison
We should be careful not to overshoot ourselves in the pursuits even of virtue.

Joseph Addison
A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of. It heightens all the virtues which it accompanies; like the shades in paintings, it raises and rounds every figure, and makes the colors more beautiful, though not so glaring as they would be without it.

Joseph Addison
In the recognition of beauty, the eye takes the most delight in color.

Joseph Addison
The moderns cannot reach their beauties, but can avoid their imperfections.

Joseph Addison