Joseph Addison Quotes

519 Sourced Quotes

Silence never shows itself to so great an advantage, as when it is made the reply to calumny and defamation, provided that we give no just occasion for them.

Joseph Addison
Mere bashfulness without merit is awkward; and merit without modesty, insolent. But modest merit has a double claim to acceptance, and generally meets with as many patrons as beholders.

Joseph Addison
Those Marriages generally abound most with Love and Constancy, that are preceded by a long Courtship.

Joseph Addison
We are apt to rely upon future prospects, and become really expensive while we are only rich in possibility. We live up to our expectations, not to our possessions, and make a figure proportionable to what we may be, not what we are.

Joseph Addison
A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.

Joseph Addison
Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant, accommodates itself to the meanest capacities, silences the loud and clamorous, and brings over the most obstinate and inflexible.

Joseph Addison
Who does not more admire Cicero as an author than as a consul of Rome?

Joseph Addison
Why will any man be so impertinently officious as to tell me all this is only fancy? If it is a dream, let me enjoy it.

Joseph Addison
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
Consecrate the place and day
To music and Cecilia.
Let no rough winds approach, nor dare
Invade the hallow'd bounds,
Nor rudely shake the tuneful air,
Nor spoil the fleeting sounds.
Nor mournful sigh nor groan be heard,
But gladness dwell on every tongue;
Whilst all, with voice and strings prepar'd,
Keep up the loud harmonious song,
And imitate the blest above,
In joy, and harmony, and love.

Joseph Addison
The honors of this world, what are they
But puff, and emptiness, and peril of falling?

Joseph Addison
In private conversation between intimate friends, the wisest men very often talk like the weakest; for indeed the talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

Joseph Addison
It is a great presumption to ascribe our successes to our own management, and not to esteem ourselves upon any blessing, rather as it is the bounty of heaven, than the acquisition of our own prudence.

Joseph Addison
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
Cheerfulness bears the same friendly regard to the mind as to the body; it banishes all anxious care and discontent, soothes and composes the passions and keeps them in a perpetual calm.

Joseph Addison
Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Joseph Addison
What can that man fear who takes care to please a Being that is able to crush all his adversaries?

Joseph Addison
The circumstance which gives authors an advantage above all these great masters, is this, that they can multiply their originals; or rather, can make copies of their works, to what number they please, which shall be as valuable as the originals themselves.

Joseph Addison
I have often reflected within myself on this unaccountable humor in womankind of being smitten with everything that is showy and superficial, and on the numberless evils that befall the sex from this light fantastical disposition.

Joseph Addison
The talent of turning men into ridicule, and exposing to laughter those one converses with, is the gratification of little minds and ungenerous tempers. A young man with this cast of mind cuts himself off from all manner of improvement.

Joseph Addison
A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty
Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.

Joseph Addison
What can be nobler than the idea it gives us of the Supreme Being?

Joseph Addison
Our disputants put me in mind of the skuttle fish, that when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens all the water about him, till he becomes invisible.

Joseph Addison
Were you with these, my prince, you'd soon forget
The pale, unripened beauties of the north.

Joseph Addison
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
Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.

Joseph Addison
Were a man's sorrows and disquietudes summed up at the end of his life, it would generally be found that he had suffered more from the apprehension of such evils as never happened to him than from those evils which had really befallen him.

Joseph Addison
There is no virtue so truly great and godlike as justice.

Joseph Addison
Ridicule is generally made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything praiseworthy in human life.

Joseph Addison
Let guilt or fear
Disturb man's rest; Cato knows neither of them,
Indifferent in his choice, to sleep or die.

Joseph Addison