Joseph Addison - Man Quotes

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Plutarch has written an essay on the benefits which a man may receive from his enemies; and, among the good fruits of enmity, mentions this in particular, that by the reproaches which it casts upon us, we see the worst side of ourselves.

Joseph Addison
It is odd to consider the connection between despotism and barbarity, and how the making one person more than man makes the rest less.

Joseph Addison
O ye powers that search
The heart of man, and weigh his inmost thoughts,
If I have done amiss, impute it not!
The best may err, but you are good.

Joseph Addison
To a man of pleasure every moment appears to be lost, which partakes not of the vivacity of amusement.

Joseph Addison
Every man in the time of courtship and in the first entrance of marriage, puts on a behavior like my correspondent's holiday suit.

Joseph Addison
"Censure," says a late ingenious author, "is the tax a man plays for being eminent." It is a folly for an eminent man to think of escaping it, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of comitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph.

Joseph Addison
Riches expose a man to pride and luxury, and a foolish elation of heart.

Joseph Addison
A man's reputation draws eyes upon him that will narrowly inspect every part of him.

Joseph Addison
I have somewhere met with the epitaph of a charitable man, which has very much pleased me. I cannot recollect the words, but the sense of it is to this purpose; What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.

Joseph Addison
There is more of turn than of truth in a saying of Seneca, "That drunkenness does not produce but discover faults." Common experience teaches the contrary. Wine throws a man out of himself, and infuses qualities into the mind which she is a stranger to in her sober moments.

Joseph Addison
What an absurd thing it is to pass over all the valuable parts of a man, and fix our attention on his infirmities.

Joseph Addison
How can it enter into the thoughts of man, that the soul, which is capable of such immense perfections, and of receiving new improvements to all eternity, shall fall away into nothing almost as soon as it is created?

Joseph Addison
It must be so — Plato, thou reasonest well!
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
O falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.

Joseph Addison
If we look into communities and divisions of men, we observe that the discreet man, not the witty, nor the learned, nor the brave, guides the conversation, and gives measure to society.

Joseph Addison
The utmost extent of man's knowledge is to know that he knows nothing.

Joseph Addison
He only is a great man who can neglect the applause of the multitude and enjoy himself independent of its favor.

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
A friend exaggerates a man's virtues; an enemy inflames his crimes.

Joseph Addison
One may know a man that never conversed in the world, by his excess of good-breeding.

Joseph Addison
I always rejoice when I see a tribunal filled with a man of an upright and inflexible temper, who in the execution of his country

Joseph Addison
Our admiration of a famous man lessens upon our nearer acquaintance with him; and we seldom hear of a celebrated person without a catalogue of some notorious weaknesses and infirmities.

Joseph Addison
Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding places in a voluminous writer.

Joseph Addison
The discreet man finds out the talents of those he converses with, and knows how to apply them to proper uses. Accordingly, if we look into particular communities and divisions of men, we may observe that it is the discreet man, not the witty, nor the learned, nor the brave, who guides the conversation, and gives measures to the society.

Joseph Addison
Advertisements are of great use to the vulgar. First of all, as they are instruments of ambition. A man that is by no means big enough for the Gazette, may easily creep into the advertisements; by which means we often see an apothecary in the same paper of news with a plenipotentiary, or a running footman with an ambassador.

Joseph Addison
Nature has sometimes made a fool; but a coxcomb is always of a man's own making.

Joseph Addison
Nothing makes a woman more esteemed by the opposite sex than chastity; whether it be that we always prize those most who are hardest to come at, or that nothing besides chastity, with its collateral attendants, truth, fixity, and constancy, gives the man a property in the person he loves, and consequently endears her to him above all things.

Joseph Addison
A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts.

Joseph Addison
Should a writer single out and point his raillery at particular persons, or satirize the miserable, he might be sure of pleasing a great part of his readers, but must be a very ill man if he could please himself.

Joseph Addison
Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible.

Joseph Addison
Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood.

Joseph Addison