Quotes by Joseph Addison
Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.
The unassuming youth seeking instruction with humility gains good fortune.
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.
To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.
True happiness... arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self.
A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.
What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.
A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.
Our friends don't see our faults, or conceal them, or soften them.
Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.
I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: "What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me."
I think I may define taste to be that faculty of the soul which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike.
What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable
When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations.
Young men soon give, and soon forget, affronts; old age is slow in both.
A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.
It is folly for an eminent person to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected by it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph.
Self discipline is that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.
Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.
Good Nature, and Evenness of Temper, will give you an easie Companion for Life; Vertue and good Sense, an agreeable Friend; Love and Constancy...
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul.
The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life... Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.
Though we seem grieved at the shortness of life in general, we are wishing every period of it at an end. The minor longs to be at age, then to be a man of business, then to make up an estate, then to arrive at honors, then to retire.
To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.
