Top 400 Joseph Addison Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy inn religion – a form of knowledge without the power of it.”

— Joseph Addison

302. “I would have every zealous man examine his heart thoroughly, and I believe he will often find that what be calls a zeal for his religion is either pride, interest, or ill-repute.”

— Joseph Addison

303. “There is nothing in which men more deceive themselves than in what they call zeal.”

— Joseph Addison

304. “To this end, nothing is to be more carefully consulted than plainness. In a lady’s attire this is the single excellence; for to be what some people call fine, is the same vice, in that case, as to be florid is in writing or speaking.”

— Joseph Addison

305. “The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.”

— Joseph Addison

306. “A few persons of an odious and despised country could not have filled the world with believers, had they not shown undoubted credentials from the divine person who sent them on such a message.”

— Joseph Addison

307. “The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.”

— Joseph Addison

308. “Though a man cannot abstain from being weak, he may from being vicious.”

— Joseph Addison

309. “True religion and virtue give a cheerful and happy turn to the mind, admit of all true pleasures, and even procure for us the highest.”

— Joseph Addison

310. “Life is not long enough for a coquette to play all her tricks in.”

— Joseph Addison

311. “A misery is not to be measure from the nature of the evil but from the temper of the sufferer.”

— Joseph Addison

312. “Irresolution on the schemes of life which offer themselves to our choice, and inconstancy in pursuing them, are the greatest causes of all our unhappiness.”

— Joseph Addison

313. “Great Pompey’s shade complains that we are slow, And Scipio’s ghost walks unaveng’d amongst us!”

— Joseph Addison

314. “Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet.”

— Joseph Addison

315. “A man improves more by reading the story of a person eminent for prudence and virtue, than by the finest rules and precepts of morality.”

— Joseph Addison

316. “The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.”

— Joseph Addison

317. “As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.”

— Joseph Addison

318. “It is ridiculous for any man to criticize on the works of another, who has not distinguished himself by his own performances.”

— Joseph Addison

319. “The English Writers of Tragedy are possessed with a Notion, that when they represent a virtuous or innocent Person in Distress, they ought not to leave him till they have delivered him out of his Troubles, or made him triumph over his Enemies.”

— Joseph Addison

320. “We see the pernicious effects of luxury in the ancient Romans, who immediately found themselves poor as soon as this vice got footing among them.”

— Joseph Addison

321. “All of heaven we have below.”

— Joseph Addison

322. “What can be nobler than the idea it gives us of the Supreme Being?”

— Joseph Addison

323. “No man writes a book without meaning something, though he may not have the faculty of writing consequentially and expressing his meaning.”

— Joseph Addison

324. “Our Grub-street biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers on purpose to make a penny of him.”

— Joseph Addison

325. “Antidotes are what you take to prevent dotes.”

— Joseph Addison

326. “Why will any man be so impertinently officious as to tell me all prospect of a future state is only fancy and delusion? Is there any merit in being the messenger of ill news. If it is a dream, let me enjoy it, since it makes me both the happier and better man.”

— Joseph Addison

327. “It happened very providentially, to the honor of the Christian religion, that it did not take its rise in the dark illiterate ages of the world, but at a time when arts and sciences were at their height.”

— Joseph Addison

328. “Tradition is an important help to history, but its statements should be carefully scrutinized before we rely on them.”

— Joseph Addison

329. “The moderns cannot reach their beauties, but can avoid their imperfections.”

— Joseph Addison

330. “There is not in earth a spectacle more worthy than a great man superior to his sufferings.”

— Joseph Addison

331. “If men of eminence are exposed to censure on one hand, they are as much liable to flattery on the other. If they receive reproaches which are not due to them, they likewise receive praises which they do not deserve.”

— Joseph Addison

332. “We have in England a particular bashfulness in every thing that regards religion.”

— Joseph Addison

333. “We make provisions for this life as if it were never to have an end, and for the other life as though it were never to have a beginning.”

— Joseph Addison

334. “If men would consider not so much wherein they differ, as wherein they agree, there would be far less of uncharitableness and angry feeling in the world.”

— Joseph Addison

335. “For my own part, I am apt to join in the opinion with those who believe that all the regions of Nature swarm with spirits, and that we have multitudes of spectators on all our actions when we think ourselves most alone.”

— Joseph Addison

336. “The first race of mankind used to dispute, as our ordinary people do now-a-days, in a kind of wild logic, uncultivated by rule of art.”

— Joseph Addison

337. “Our admiration of a famous man lessens upon our nearer acquaintance with him; and we seldom hear of a celebrated person without a catalogue of some notorious weaknesses and infirmities.”

— Joseph Addison

338. “Dependence is a perpetual call upon humanity, and a greater incitement to tenderness and pity than any other motive whatever.”

— Joseph Addison

339. “In the common run of mankind, for one that is wise and good you find ten of a contrary character.”

— Joseph Addison

340. “Hunting is not a proper employment for a thinking man.”

— Joseph Addison

341. “I am very much concerned when I see young gentlemen of fortune and quality so wholly set upon pleasures and diversions, that they neglect all those improvements in wisdom and knowledge which may make them easy to themselves and useful to the world.”

— Joseph Addison

342. “A fine coat is but a livery when the person who wears it discovers no higher sense than that of a footman.”

— Joseph Addison

343. “Plutarch has written an essay on the benefits which a man may receive from his enemies; and among the good fruits of enmity, mentions this in particular, that by the reproaches which it casts upon us, we see the worst side of ourselves.”

— Joseph Addison

344. “Many actions calculated to procure fame are not conducive to ultimate happiness.”

— Joseph Addison

345. “What can that man fear who takes care to please a Being that is able to crush all his adversaries?”

— Joseph Addison

346. “A man who has any relish for fine writing either discovers new beauties or receives stronger impressions from the masterly strokes of a great author every time he peruses him; besides that he naturally wears himself into the same manner of speaking and thinking.”

— Joseph Addison

347. “Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition.”

— Joseph Addison

348. “But in all despotic governments, though a particular prince may favour arts and letter, there is a natural degeneracy of mankind.”

— Joseph Addison

349. “Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.”

— Joseph Addison

350. “That fine part of our construction, the eye, seems as much the receptacle and seat of our passions as the mind itself; and at least it is the outward portal to introduce them to the house within, or rather the common thoroughfare to let our affections pass in and out.”

— Joseph Addison