Top 400 Joseph Addison Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Music can noble hints impart, Engender fury, kindle love, With unsuspected eloquence can move, And manage all the man with secret art.”

— Joseph Addison

52. “If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend.”

— Joseph Addison

53. “Nothing is more amiable than true modesty, and nothing more contemptible than the false. The one guards virtue, the other betrays it.”

— Joseph Addison

54. “True benevolence or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathizes with the distress of every creature capable of sensation.”

— Joseph Addison

55. “A brother’s sufferings claim a brother’s pity.”

— Joseph Addison

56. “One should take good care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life as laughter.”

— Joseph Addison

57. “Honor’s a fine imaginary notion, that draws in raw and unexperienced men to real mischiefs.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

59. “Our disputants put me in mind of the cuttlefish that, when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens the water about him till he becomes invisible.”

— Joseph Addison

60. “For wheresoe’er I turn my ravish’d eyes, Gay gilded scenes and shining prospects rise, Poetic fields encompass me around, And still I seem to tread on classic ground.”

— Joseph Addison

61. “A state of temperance, sobriety and justice without devotion is a cold, lifeless, insipid condition of virtue, and is rather to be styled philosophy than religion.”

— Joseph Addison

62. “This not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.”

— Joseph Addison

63. “Plenty of people wish to become devout, but no one wishes to be humble.”

— Joseph Addison

64. “Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful.”

— Joseph Addison

65. “A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.”

— Joseph Addison

66. “A person may be qualified to do greater good to mankind and become more beneficial to the world, by morality without faith than by faith without morality.”

— Joseph Addison

67. “Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

69. “Quick sensitivity is inseperable from a ready understanding.”

— Joseph Addison

70. “A vast space naturally raises in my thoughts the idea of an Almighty Being.”

— Joseph Addison

71. “An empty desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.”

— Joseph Addison

72. “Good nature is more agreeable in conversation than wit and gives a certain air to the countenance which is more amiable than beauty.”

— Joseph Addison

73. “I consider an human soul without education like marble in the quarry, which shows none of its inherent beauties till the skill of the polisher fetches out the colours, makes the surface shine, and discovers every ornamental cloud, spot and vein that runs through the body of it.”

— Joseph Addison

74. “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.”

— Joseph Addison

75. “I have often thought, says Sir Roger, it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the middle of Winter.”

— Joseph Addison

76. “The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.”

— Joseph Addison

77. “Men who cherish for women the highest respect are seldom popular with them.”

— Joseph Addison

78. “Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature.”

— Joseph Addison

79. “Good Nature, and Evenness of Temper, will give you an easie Companion for Life; Vertue and good Sense, an agreeable Friend; Love and Constancy, a good Wife or Husband. Where we meet one Person with all these Accomplishments, we find an Hundred without any one of them.”

— Joseph Addison

80. “An honest man, that is not quite sober, has nothing to fear.”

— Joseph Addison

81. “A perfect tragedy is the noblest production of human nature.”

— Joseph Addison

82. “Good-breeding shows itself most where to an ordinary eye it appears the least.”

— Joseph Addison

83. “Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part of life.”

— Joseph Addison

84. “Ridicule is generally made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything praiseworthy in human life.”

— Joseph Addison

85. “Thus I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species.”

— Joseph Addison

86. “Nature in her whole drama never drew such a part; she has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man’s own making...”

— Joseph Addison

87. “Waning moons their settled periods keep, to swell the billows and ferment the deep.”

— Joseph Addison

88. “As vivacity is the gift of woman, gravity is that of men.”

— Joseph Addison

89. “Marriage enlarges the scene of our happiness and miseries. A marriage of love is pleasant; a marriage of interest, easy; and a marriage where both meet, happy. A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendship, all the enjoyments of sense and reason, and, indeed, all the sweets of life.”

— Joseph Addison

90. “Justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is always, therefore, represented as blind.”

— Joseph Addison

91. “Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.”

— Joseph Addison

92. “There is no virtue so truly great and godlike as justice.”

— Joseph Addison

93. “Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter.”

— Joseph Addison

94. “Music religious heat inspires, It wakes the soul, and lifts it high, And wings it with sublime desires, And fits it to bespeak the Deity.”

— Joseph Addison

95. “In private conversation between intimate friends, the wisest men very often talk like the weakest : for indeed the talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.”

— Joseph Addison

96. “I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.”

— Joseph Addison

97. “The sense of honour is of so fine and delicate a nature, that it is only to be met with in minds which are naturally noble, or in such as have been cultivated by good examples, or a refined education.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

99. “When a man becomes familiar with his goddess, she quickly sinks into a woman.”

— Joseph Addison

100. “If I can in any way contribute to the Diversion or Improvement of the Country in which I live, I shall leave it, when I am summoned out of it, with the secret Satisfaction of thinking that I have not lived in vain.”

— Joseph Addison