Joseph Addison Quotes

519 Sourced Quotes

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
The moral perfections of the Deity, the more attentively we consider, the more perfectly still shall we know them.

Joseph Addison
Among the English authors, Shakespeare has incomparably excelled all others. That noble extravagance of fancy, which he had in so great perfection, thoroughly qualified him to touch the weak, superstitious part of his readers' imagination, and made him capable of succeeding where he had nothing to support him besides the strength of his own genius.

Joseph Addison
I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an art, the former as a habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent.

Joseph Addison
In the common run of mankind, for one that is wise and good you find ten of a contrary character.

Joseph Addison
There is no kind of false wit which has been so recommended by the practice of all ages, as that which consists in a jingle of words, and is comprehended under the general name of punning.

Joseph Addison
Is there not some chosen curse,
Some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven,
Red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man
Who owes his greatness to his country's ruin?

Joseph Addison
The Infusion of a China plant sweetened with the pith of an Indian Cane.

Joseph Addison
The greatest parts, without discretion, as observed by an elegant writer, may be fatal to their owner; as Polyphemus, deprived of his eyes, was only the more exposed on account of His enormous strength and stature.

Joseph Addison
On you, most loved, with anxious fear I wait,
And from your judgment must expect my fate.

Joseph Addison
The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.

Joseph Addison
It is ridiculous for any man to criticise on the works of another who has not distinguished himself by his own performances.

Joseph Addison
Falsehood and fraud shoot up in every soil
The product of all climes.

Joseph Addison
There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

Joseph Addison