Joseph Addison Quotes

519 Sourced Quotes

Upon laying a weight in one of the scales, inscribed eternity, though I threw in that of time, prosperity, affliction, wealth, and poverty, which seemed very ponderous, they were not able to stir the opposite balance.

Joseph Addison
Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.

Joseph Addison
There is not a more melancholy object than a man who has his head turned with religious enthusiasm.

Joseph Addison
A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants; and secondly, how much more unhappy he might be than he really is.

Joseph Addison
The consciousness of being loved softens the keenest pang even at the moment of parting; yea, even the eternal farewell is robbed of half of its bitterness when uttered in accents that breathe love to the last sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Addison
Among those evils which befall us, there are many which have been more painful to us in the prospect than by their actual pressure.

Joseph Addison
A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.

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

Joseph Addison