Richard Steele - The Spectator

31 Sourced Quotes

View all Richard Steele Quotes
It is a very melancholy reflection that men are usually so weak that it is absolutely necessary for them to know sorrow and pain to be in their right senses.

Richard Steele
Since we cannot promise our selves constant health, let us endeavour at such temper as may be our best support in the decay of it.

Richard Steele
There is hardly that person to be found who is not more concerned for the reputation of wit and sense, than honesty and virtue.

Richard Steele
Mutual good humor is a dress we ought to appear in wherever we meet, and we should make no mention of what concerns ourselves, without it be of matters wherein our friends ought to rejoice.

Richard Steele
Pleasure seizes the whole man who addicts himself to it, and will not give him leisure for any good office in life which contradicts the gayety of the present hour.

Richard Steele
Pleasure, when it is a man's chief purpose, disappoints itself; and the constant application to it palls the faculty of enjoying it.

Richard Steele
No woman is capable of being beautiful who is not incapable of being false.

Richard Steele
Such is the weakness of our nature, that when men are a little exalted in their condition they immediately conceive they have additional senses, and their capacities enlarged not only above other men, but above human comprehension itself.

Richard Steele
It is a wonderful thing that so many, and they not reckoned absurd, shall entertain those with whom they converse by giving them the history of their pains and aches and imagine such narrations their quota of conversation.

Richard Steele
It is an endless and frivolous Pursuit to act by any other Rule than the Care of satisfying our own Minds in what we do

Richard Steele
The survivorship of a worthy man in his son is a pleasure scarce inferior to the hopes of the continuance of his own life.

Richard Steele
It is a certain sign of an ill heart to be inclined to defamation. They who are harmless and innocent can have no gratification that way; but it ever arises from a neglect of what is laudable in a man's self.

Richard Steele
The praise of an ignorant man is only good-will, and you should receive his kindness as he is a good neighbor in society, and not as a good judge of your actions in point of fame and reputation.

Richard Steele
It is the duty of a great person so to demean himself, as that whatever endowments he may have, he may appear to value himself upon no qualities but such as any man may arrive at.

Richard Steele
The person, whom you favored with a loan, if he be a good man, will think himself in your debt after he has paid you.

Richard Steele
The world is grown so full of dissimulation and compliment, that men's words are hardly any signification of their thoughts.

Richard Steele
A favor well bestowed is almost as great an honor to him who confers it as to him who receives it.

Richard Steele
Pride destroys all symmetry and grace, and affectation is a more terrible enemy to fine faces than the small-pox.

Richard Steele
A man advanced in years that thinks fit to look back on his former life, and calls that only life which was passed with satisfaction and enjoyment, excluding all parts which were not pleasant to him, will find himself very young, if not in infancy.

Richard Steele
A lie is troublesome, and sets a man's invention upon the rack, and one trick needs a great many more to make it good.

Richard Steele
Since our persons are not of our own making, when they are such as appear defective or uncomely, it is, methinks, an honest and laudable fortitude to dare to be ugly.

Richard Steele
One common calamity makes men extremely affect each other, though they differ in every other particular

Richard Steele
It is an impertinent and unreasonable fault in conversation for one man to take up all the discourse.

Richard Steele
A Woman is naturally more helpless than the other Sex; and a Man of Honour and Sense should have this in his View in all Manner of Commerce with her.

Richard Steele
Among all the diseases of the mind there is not one more epidemical or more pernicious than the love of flattery.

Richard Steele
Of all the affections which attend human life, the love of glory is the most ardent.

Richard Steele
When you fall into a man's conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.

Richard Steele
No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience…

Richard Steele
Age in a virtuous person, of either sex, carries in it an authority which makes it preferable to all the pleasures of youth.

Richard Steele
In a word, the married state, with and without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of heaven and hell we are capable of receiving in this life.

Richard Steele