Top 400 Joseph Addison Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.”

— Joseph Addison

152. “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.”

— Joseph Addison

153. “It is the privilege of posterity to set matters right between those antagonists who, by their rivalry for greatness, divided a whole age.”

— Joseph Addison

154. “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

155. “Eternity! thou pleasing dreadful thought! Through what variety of untried being, Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!”

— Joseph Addison

156. “I have but nine-pence in ready money, but I can draw for a thousand pounds.”

— Joseph Addison

157. “There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

159. “But silence never shows itself to so great an advantage, as when it is made the reply to calumny and defamation, provided that we give no just occasion for them.”

— Joseph Addison

160. “Among the several kinds of beauty, the eye takes most delight in colors.”

— Joseph Addison

161. “When a man has been guilty of any vice or folly, the best atonement he can make for it is to warn others not to fall into the like.”

— Joseph Addison

162. “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.”

— Joseph Addison

163. “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

164. “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.”

— Joseph Addison

165. “Adulterers, in the first stages of the church, were excommunicated forever, and unqualified all their lives for bearing a part in Christian assemblies, notwithstanding they might seek it with tears, and all the appearances of the most unfeigned repentance.”

— Joseph Addison

166. “The person who has a firm trust in the Supreme Being is powerful in his power, wise by his wisdom, happy by his happiness.”

— Joseph Addison

167. “There is nothing more requisite in business than despatch.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

169. “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

170. “Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

173. “There are no more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants. They knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good offices, distribute the gifts of Nature, find work for the poor, and wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great.”

— Joseph Addison

174. “There is nothing that more betrays a base ungenerous spirit than the giving of secret stabs to a man’s reputation. Lampoons and satires that are written with wit and spirit are like poisoned darts, which not only inflict a wound, but make it incurable.”

— Joseph Addison

175. “Half the misery of human life might be extinguished if men would alleviate the general curse they lie under by mutual offices of compassion, benevolence, and humanity.”

— Joseph Addison

176. “By anticipation we sugar misery and enjoy happiness before they are in being. We can set the sun and stars forward, or lose sight of them by wandering into those retired parts of eternity when the heavens and earth shall be no more.”

— Joseph Addison

177. “There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato’s description of the Supreme Being, – that truth is His body and light His shadow. According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

179. “Contentment produces, in some measure, all those effects which the alchemist usually ascribes to what he calls the philosopher’s stone; and if it does not bring riches, it does the same thing by banishing the desire for them.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

181. “One would think that the larger the company is in which we are engaged, the greater variety of thoughts and subjects would be started into discourse; but, instead of this we find that conversation is never so much straightened and confined, as in numerous assemblies.”

— Joseph Addison

182. “There is more of turn than of truth in a saying of Seneca, “That drunkenness does not produce but discover faults.” Common experience teaches the contrary. Wine throws a man out of himself, and infuses dualities into the mind which she is a stranger to in her sober moments.”

— Joseph Addison

183. “Were not this desire of fame very strong, the difficulty of obtaining it, and the danger of losing it when obtained, would be sufficient to deter a man from so vain a pursuit.”

— Joseph Addison

184. “The very first discovery of beauty strikes the mind with an inward joy, and spreads a cheerfulness and delight through all its faculties.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

186. “An idol may be undeified by many accidental causes. Marriage, in particular, is a kind of counter apotheosis, as a deification inverted. When a man becomes familiar with his goddess she quickly sinks into a woman.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

190. “True modesty avoids everything that is criminal; false modesty everything that is unfashionable.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

192. “A contemplation of God’s works, a generous concern for the good of mankind, and the unfeigned exercise of humility only, denominate men great and glorious.”

— Joseph Addison

193. “A good disposition is more valuable than gold, for the latter is the gift of fortune, but the former is the dower of nature.”

— Joseph Addison

194. “The pleasantest part of a man’s life is generally that which passes in courtship, provided his passion be sincere, and the party beloved kind with discretion. Love, desire, hope, all the pleasing emotions of the soul, rise in the pursuit.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

198. “Nothing, says Longinus, can be great, the contempt of which is great.”

— Joseph Addison

199. “The first of all virtues is innocence; the next is modesty. If we banish modesty out of the world, she carries away with her half the virtue that is in it.”

— Joseph Addison

200. “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.’”

— Joseph Addison