Joseph Addison Quotes

519 Sourced Quotes

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

Joseph Addison
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
A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.

Joseph Addison
Our Grubstreet biographers…watch for the death of a great man, like so many undertakers, on purpose to make a penny of him.

Joseph Addison
'Tis not in mortals to command success,
But we'll do more, Sempronius; we'll deserve it.

Joseph Addison
Sweet are the slumbers of the virtuous man.

Joseph Addison
Thus I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species.

Joseph Addison
In the founders of great families, titles or attributes of honor are generally correspondent with the virtues of the person to whom they are applied; but in their descendants they are too often the marks rather of grandeur than of merit. The stamp and denomination still continue, but the intrinsic value is frequently lost.

Joseph Addison
The wildness of those compositions which go by the name of essays.

Joseph Addison
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.

Joseph Addison
Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition.

Joseph Addison
An indiscreet man is more hurtful than an ill-natured one; for as the latter will only attack his enemies, and those he wishes ill to, the other injures indifferently both friends and foes.

Joseph Addison
When a man has been guilty of any vice or folly, I think the best atonement he can make for it is to warn others not to fall into the like.

Joseph Addison
A solid and substantial greatness of soul looks down with neglect on the censures and applauses of the multitude.

Joseph Addison
Fain would I Raphael's godlike art rehearse,
And show th' immortal labours in my verse,
Where from themingled strength of shade and light
A new creation rises to my sight,
Such heavenly figures from his pencil flow,
So warm with life his blended colours glow.
From theme to theme with secret pleasure tost,
Amidst the soft variety I 'm lost:
Here pleasing airs my ravish'd soul confound
With circling notes and labyrinths of sound;
Here domes and temples rise in distant views,
And opening palaces invite my Muse.

Joseph Addison
A man's first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next to escape the censures of the world: if the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neglected; but otherwise there cannot be a greater satisfaction to an honest mind, than to see those approbations which it gives itself seconded by the applauses of the public: a man is more sure of his conduct, when the verdict which he passes upon his own behaviour is thus warranted and confirmed by the opinion of all that know him.

Joseph Addison
Who rant by note, and through the gamut rage; in songs and airs express their martial fire; combat in trills, and in a fugue expire.

Joseph Addison
O Dormer, how can I behold thy fate,
And not the wonders of thy youth relate;
How can I see the gay, the brave, the young,
Fall in the cloud of war, and lie unsung!
In joys of conquest he resigns his breath,
And, filled with England's glory, smiles in death.

Joseph Addison
Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.

Joseph Addison
There is nothing more requisite in business than dispatch.

Joseph Addison
That fine part of our construction, the eye, seems as much the receptacle and seat of our passions as the mind itself; and at least it is the outward portal to introduce them to the house within, or rather the common thoroughfare to let our affections pass in and out.

Joseph Addison