Joseph Addison Quotes
The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture.
If men would consider not so much wherein they differ, as wherein they agree, there would be far less of uncharitableness and angry feeling in the world.
The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight.
To be perfectly just is an attribute of the divine nature; to be so to the utmost of our abilities, is the glory of man.
The peacock in all his pride does not display half the colors that appear in the garments of a British lady when she is dressed.
To a man of pleasure every moment appears to be lost, which partakes not of the vivacity of amusement.
Oh, Liberty! thou goddess heavenly bright! Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight! Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign, And smiling plenty leads thy wanton train.
If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. He has a heart capable of mirth, and naturally disposed to it.
Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.
The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.
The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.
What an absurd thing it is to pass over all the valuable parts of a man, and fix our attention on his infirmities.
Should the whole frame of nature round him break, In ruin and confusion hurled, He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack, And stand secure amidst a falling world.
A few persons of an odious and despised country could not have filled the world with believers, had they not shown undoubted credentials from the divine person who sent them on such a message.
What can that man fear who takes care to please a Being that is able to crush all his adversaries?
A man improves more by reading the story of a person eminent for prudence and virtue, than by the finest rules and precepts of morality.
Devotion, when it does not lie under the check of reason, is apt to degenerate into enthusiasm.
There is not a more melancholy object than a man who has his head turned with religious enthusiasm.
The schoolboy counts the time till the return of the holidays; the minor longs to be of age; the lover is impatient till he is married.
I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as a habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent.
Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species.
It must be a prospect pleasing to God Himself to see His creation forever beautifying in His eyes, and drawing nearer Him by greater degrees of resemblance.
There is no greater sign of a general decay of virtue in a nation, than a want of zeal in its inhabitants for the good of their country.
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.
In my Lucia's absence Life hangs upon me, and becomes a burden; I am ten times undone, while hope, and fear, And grief, and rage and love rise up at once, And with variety of pain distract me.
That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?
There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.
If there's a power above us, (And that there is all nature cries aloud Through all her works,) he must delight in virtue.
Whether zeal or moderation be the point we aim at, let us keep fire out of the one, and frost out of the other.
Physic, for the most part, is nothing else but the substitute of exercise and temperance.
Vanity is the natural weakness of an ambitious man, which exposes him to the secret scorn and derision of those he converses with, and ruins the character he is so industrious to advance by it.
The first race of mankind used to dispute, as our ordinary people do now-a-days, in a kind of wild logic, uncultivated by rule of art.
Among those evils which befall us, there are many which have been more painful to us in the prospect than by their actual pressure.
There are greater depths and obscurities, greater intricacies and perplexities, in an elaborate and well-written piece of nonsense, than in the most abstruse and profound tract of school divinity.
This party spirit has so ill an effect on our morals, it has likewise a very great one upon our judgments.
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.
