Joseph Addison Quotes

519 Sourced Quotes

Thy steady temper, Portius,
Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud, and Caesar,
In the calm lights of mild philosophy.

Joseph Addison
Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses; it fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas; — converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments.

Joseph Addison
The pride of woman, natural to her, never sleeps until modesty is gone.

Joseph Addison
Round-heads and Wooden-shoes are standing jokes.

Joseph Addison
Hudibras has defined nonsense, as Cowley does wit, by negatives. Nonsense, he says, is that which is neither true nor false. These two great properties of nonsense, which are always essential to it, give it such a peculiar advantage over all other writings, that it is incapable of being either answered or contradicted.

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

Joseph Addison
Temperance gives nature her full play, and enables her to exert herself in all her force and vigor.

Joseph Addison
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.

Joseph Addison
Of his shallow species there is not a more unfortunate, empty and conceited animal than that which is generally known by the name of a critic.

Joseph Addison
Great Pompey's shade complains that we are slow,
And Scipio's ghost walks unavenged amongst us!

Joseph Addison
I will indulge my sorrows, and give way
To all the pangs and fury of despair.

Joseph Addison
Should I publish any favors done me by your lordship, I am afraid it would look more like vanity than gratitude.

Joseph Addison
It is impossible for authors to discover beauties in one another's works: they have eyes only for spots and blemishes.

Joseph Addison
It must be so—Plato, thou reason'st well!—
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
Of falling into naught?

Joseph Addison
The care of our national commerce redounds more to the riches and prosperity of the public than any other act of government.

Joseph Addison
Religion prescribes to every miserable man the means of bettering his condition; nay, it shows him that the bearing of his afflictions as he ought to do, will naturally end in the removal of them.

Joseph Addison
There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato's description of the Supreme Being, — that truth is His body and light His shadow. According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood.

Joseph Addison
The time never lies heavy upon him; it is impossible for him to be alone.

Joseph Addison
Cheerfulness is, in the first place, the best promoter of health. Repining and secret murmurs of heart give imperceptible strokes to those delicate fibres of which the vital parts are composed.

Joseph Addison
Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief, and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

Joseph Addison
When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.

Joseph Addison
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
The utmost we can hope for in this world is contentment; if we aim at anything higher, we shall meet with nothing but grief and disappointment. A man should direct all his studies and endeavors at making himself easy now and happy hereafter.

Joseph Addison
I am sick of this bad world! The daylight and the sun grow painful to me.

Joseph Addison
Arnobius tells us that this martyrdom first of all made them seriously inquisitive into that religion which could endue the mind with so much strength and overcome the fear of death.

Joseph Addison
Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
And all of heaven we have below.

Joseph Addison
Sir Roger told them, with the air of a man who would not give his judgement rashly, that much might be said on both sides.

Joseph Addison
The most skillful flattery is to let a person talk on, and be a listener.

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

Joseph Addison
I think I may define it to be that faculty of the soul which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike.

Joseph Addison