Joseph Addison Quotes

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

For ever singing as they shine, The hand that made us is divine.

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.

Blesses his stars and thinks it luxury.

Sweet are the slumbers of the virtuous man.

Heaven is not to be looked upon only as the reward, but the natural effect, of a religious life.

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.

Great Pompey's shade complains that we are slow, And Scipio's ghost walks unavenged amongst us!

A cheerful temper, joined with innocence will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good-natured.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind

An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience.

The talent of turning men into ridicule, and exposing to laughter those one converses with, is the qualification of little ungenerous tempers.

Oh! think what anxious moments pass between The birth of plots, and their last fatal periods, Oh! 'tis a dreadful interval of time, Filled up with horror all, and big with death!

There is not a more pleasante exercise of the mind than gratitude.

Our friends don't see our faults, or conceal them, or soften them.

Among those evils which befall us, there are many which have been more painful to us in the prospect than by their actual pressure.

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.

Physic, for the most part, is nothing else but the substitute of exercise and temperance.

Whether zeal or moderation be the point we aim at, let us keep fire out of the one, and frost out of the other.

If there's a power above us, (And that there is all nature cries aloud Through all her works,) he must delight in virtue.

Some virtues are only seen in affliction and others only in prosperity.

Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.

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.

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.

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.

Great souls by instinct to each other turn, demand alliance, and in friendship burn.

Conspiracies no sooner should be formed Than executed.

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.

Silence is sometimes more significant and sublime than the most noble and most expressive eloquence, and is on many occasions the indication of a great mind.

Content thyself to be obscurely good.

This not in mortals to command success, but we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it.

Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honoris a private station.

A misery is not to be measure from the nature of the evil but from the temper of the sufferer.

A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and should make a due discrimination between those that are and those that are not the proper objects of it.

We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of art.

If ridicule were employed to laugh men out of vice and folly, it might be of some use.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

The end of a man's life is often compared to the winding up of a well written play, where the principal persons still act in character, whatever the fate in which they undergo.

The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out of a proper method to catch the reader's eye; without which, a good thing may pass over unobserved, or lost among commissions of bankrupt.

A man whose extraordinary reputation thus lifts him up to the notice and observation of mankind, draws a multitude of eyes upon him, that will narrowly inspect every part of him.

Wine displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.

There is nothing in which men more deceive themselves than in what they call zeal.

If our zeal were true and genuine we should be much more angry with a sinner than a heretic.

I would have every zealous man examine his heart thoroughly, and I believe he will often find that what be calls a zeal for his religion is either pride, interest, or ill-repute.

What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.

There is no talent so pernicious as eloquence to those who have it under command.

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.

Simonides, a poet famous in his generation, is, I think, author of the oldest satire that is now extant, and, as some say, of the first that was ever written.

Instability of temper ought to be checked when it disposes men to wander from one scheme to another: since such a fickleness cannot but be attended with fatal consequences.

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