Top 400 Joseph Addison Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses.”

— Joseph Addison

102. “The time never lies heavy upon him; it is impossible for him to be alone.”

— Joseph Addison

103. “When I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together.”

— Joseph Addison

104. “Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

107. “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.”

— Joseph Addison

108. “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

109. “They were a people so primitive they did not know how to get money, except by working for it.”

— Joseph Addison

110. “Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.”

— Joseph Addison

111. “A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.”

— Joseph Addison

112. “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

113. “Love is a second life...”

— Joseph Addison

114. “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.”

— Joseph Addison

115. “There is nothing touches our imagination so much as a beautiful woman in a plain dress.”

— Joseph Addison

116. “There is no defense against reproach, but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness.”

— Joseph Addison

117. “Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

119. “The Infusion of a China plant sweetened with the pith of an Indian Cane.”

— Joseph Addison

120. “Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind.”

— Joseph Addison

121. “The friendships of the world are oft confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasures.”

— Joseph Addison

122. “I should think myself a very bad woman, if I had done what I do for a farthing less.”

— Joseph Addison

123. “A money-lender – he serves you in the present tense; he lends you in the conditional mood; keeps you in the conjunctive; and ruins you in the future.”

— Joseph Addison

124. “A jealous man is very quick in his application: he knows how to find a double edge in an invective, and to draw a satire on himself out of a panegyrick on another.”

— Joseph Addison

125. “A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

127. “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.”

— Joseph Addison

128. “The Fashionable World is grown free and easie; our Manners sit more loose upon us: Nothing is so modish as an agreeable Negligence. In a word, Good Breeding shows it self most, where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least.”

— Joseph Addison

129. “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

130. “There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

132. “The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas.”

— Joseph Addison

133. “Husband a lie, and trump it up in some extraordinary emergency.”

— Joseph Addison

134. “The disease of jealously is so malignant that is converts all it takes into its own nourishment.”

— Joseph Addison

135. “It must be so, Plato, thou reason’st well!”

— Joseph Addison

136. “There is not a more melancholy object than a man who has his head turned with religious enthusiasm.”

— Joseph Addison

137. “Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world, and ignorance of mankind.”

— Joseph Addison

138. “See in what peace a Christian can die.”

— Joseph Addison

139. “There is no passion that steals into the heart more imperceptibly and covers itself under more disguises than pride.”

— Joseph Addison

140. “Talk not of love: thou never knew’st its force.”

— Joseph Addison

141. “Our friends don’t see our faults, or conceal them, or soften them.”

— Joseph Addison

142. “Amidst the soft variety I’m lost.”

— Joseph Addison

143. “Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above or below him are serious.”

— Joseph Addison

144. “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

145. “The Obedience of Children to their Parents is the Basis of all Government, and set forth as the measure of that Obedience which weowe to those whom Providence hath placed over us.”

— Joseph Addison

146. “This party spirit has so ill an effect on our morals, it has likewise a very great one upon our judgments.”

— Joseph Addison

147. “A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections.”

— Joseph Addison

148. “Virtue which shuns, the day.”

— Joseph Addison

149. “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.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison