Top 400 Joseph Addison Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Learning, like traveling and all other methods of improvement, as it finishes good sense, so it makes a silly man ten thousand times more insufferable by supplying variety of matter to his impertinence, and giving him an opportunity of abounding in absurdities.”

— Joseph Addison

202. “It was a saying of an ancient philosopher, which I find some of our writers have ascribed to Queen Elizabeth, who perhaps might have taken occasion to repeat it, that a good face is a letter of recommendation.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

204. “Virtue which shuns, the day.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

207. “Vanity is the natural weakness of an ambitious man, which exposes him to the secret scorn and derision of those he converses with, and ruins the character he is so industrious to advance by it.”

— Joseph Addison

208. “It is not the business of virtue to extirpate the affections of the mind, but to regulate them.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

210. “T is the Divinity that stirs within us.”

— Joseph Addison

211. “Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant.”

— Joseph Addison

212. “It is observed by Cicero, that men of the greatest and most shining parts are most actuated by ambition.”

— Joseph Addison

213. “A thousand trills and quivering sounds In airy circles o’er us fly, Till, wafted by a gentle breeze, They faint and languish by degrees, And at a distance die.”

— Joseph Addison

214. “The productions of a great genius, with many lapses and inadvertences, are infinitely preferable to the works of an inferior kind of author which are scrupulously exact, and conformable to all the rules of correct writing.”

— Joseph Addison

215. “It is pleasant to see a notorious profligate seized with a concern for religion, and converting his spleen into zeal.”

— Joseph Addison

216. “Mere bashfulness without merit is awkward; and merit without modesty, insolent. But modest merit has a double claim to acceptance, and generally meets with as many patrons as beholders.”

— Joseph Addison

217. “There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good-nature, or something which must bear its appearance and supply its place. For this reason mankind have been forced to invent a kind of artificial humanity, which is what we express by the word Good-Breeding.”

— Joseph Addison

218. “Wit is the fetching of congruity out of incongruity.”

— Joseph Addison

219. “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

220. “Complaisance renders a superior amiable, an equal agreeable, and an inferior acceptable.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

222. “There is no kind of false wit which has been so recommended by the practice of all ages, as that which consists in a jingle of words, and is comprehended under the general name of punning.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

224. “There is no passion that is not finely expressed in those parts of the inspired writings which are proper for divine songs and anthems.”

— Joseph Addison

225. “Yet then from all my grief, O Lord, Thy mercy set me free, Whilst in the confidence of pray’r My soul took hold on thee.”

— Joseph Addison

226. “All well-regulated families set apart an hour every morning for tea and bread and butter.”

— Joseph Addison

227. “Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.”

— Joseph Addison

228. “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

229. “How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue!”

— Joseph Addison

230. “The Gods in bounty work up storms about us, that give mankind occasion to exert their hidden strength, and throw our into practice virtues that shun the day, and lie concealed in the smooth seasons and the calms of life.”

— Joseph Addison

231. “To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.”

— Joseph Addison

232. “It is impossible for authors to discover beauties in one another’s works; they have eyes only for spots and blemishes.”

— Joseph Addison

233. “Upon laying a weight in one of the scales, inscribed eternity, though I threw in that of time, prosperity, affliction, wealth, and poverty, which seemed very ponderous, they were not able to stir the opposite balance.”

— Joseph Addison

234. “If men, who in their hearts are friends to a government, forbear giving it their utmost assistance against its enemies, they put it in the power of a few desperate men to ruin the welfare of those who are much superior to them in strength, number, and interest.”

— Joseph Addison

235. “The moral virtues, without religion are but cold, lifeless, and insipid; it is only religion which opens the mind to great conceptions, fills it with the most sublime ideas, and warms the soul with more than sensual pleasures.”

— Joseph Addison

236. “A well regulated commerce is not, like law, physic, or divinity, to be overstocked with hands; but, on the contrary, flourishes by multitudes, and gives employment to all its professors.”

— Joseph Addison

237. “Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man.”

— Joseph Addison

238. “Let echo, too, perform her part, Prolonging every note with art; And in a low expiring strain, Play all the comfort o’er again.”

— Joseph Addison

239. “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

240. “The memory is perpetually looking back when we have nothing present to entertain us. It is like those repositories in animals that are filled with food, on which they may ruminate when their present pastures fail.”

— Joseph Addison

241. “Some virtues are only seen in affliction and others only in prosperity.”

— Joseph Addison

242. “A woman seldom asks advice before she has bought her wedding clothes.”

— Joseph Addison

243. “In the loss of an object we do not proportion our grief to the real value it bears, but to the value our fancies set upon it.”

— Joseph Addison

244. “Every man in the time of courtship and in the first entrance of marriage, puts on a behavior like my correspondent’s holiday suit.”

— Joseph Addison

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

— Joseph Addison

246. “Nations with nations mix’d confus’dly die, and lost in one promiscuous carnage lie.”

— Joseph Addison

247. “The peacock in all his pride does not display half the colors that appear in the garments of a British lady when she is dressed.”

— Joseph Addison

248. “When I read the rules of criticism, I immediately inquire after the works of the author who has written them, and by that means discover what it is he likes in a composition.”

— Joseph Addison

249. “I consider time as an in immense ocean, in which many noble authors are entirely swallowed up.”

— Joseph Addison

250. “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.”

— Joseph Addison