Top 400 Joseph Addison Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “My voice is still for war.”

— Joseph Addison

402. “The care of our national commerce redounds more to the riches and prosperity of the public than any other act of government.”

— Joseph Addison

403. “It generally takes its rise either from an ill-will to mankind, a private inclination to make ourselves esteemed, an ostentation of wit, and vanity of being thought in the secrets of the world; or from a desire of gratifying any of these dispositions of mind in those persons with whom we converse.”

— Joseph Addison

404. “Fables take off from the severity of instruction, and enforce it at the same time that they conceal it.”

— Joseph Addison

405. “Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood.”

— Joseph Addison

406. “On you, my lord, with anxious fear I wait, and from your judgment must expect my fate.”

— Joseph Addison

407. “Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species.”

— Joseph Addison

408. “There is not a more pleasante exercise of the mind than gratitude.”

— Joseph Addison

409. “A religious hope does not only bear up the mind under her sufferings but makes her rejoice in them.”

— Joseph Addison

410. “Devotion, when it does not lie under the check of reason, is apt to degenerate into enthusiasm.”

— Joseph Addison

411. “I always rejoice when I see a tribunal filled with a man of an upright and inflexible temper, who in the execution of his country.”

— Joseph Addison

412. “In that disputable point of persecuting men for conscience sake, I see such dreadful consequences rising, I would be as fully convinced of the truth of it, as a mathematical demonstration, before I would venture to act upon it or make it a part of my religion.”

— Joseph Addison

413. “Were a man’s sorrows and disquietudes summed up at the end of his life, it would generally be found that he had suffered more from the apprehension of such evils as never happened to him than from those evils which had really befallen him.”

— Joseph Addison

414. “The world is so full of ill-nature that I have lampoons sent me by people who cannot spell, and satires composed by those who scarce know how to write.”

— Joseph Addison

415. “The only way therefore to try a Piece of Wit, is to translate it into a different Language: If it bears the Test you may pronounceit true; but if it vanishes in the Experiment you may conclude it to have been a Punn.”

— Joseph Addison

416. “To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.”

— Joseph Addison

417. “Justice is that which is practiced by God himself, and to be practiced in its perfection by none but him. Omniscience and omnipotence are requisite for the full exertion of it.”

— Joseph Addison

418. “It is a great presumption to ascribe our successes to our own management, and not to esteem ourselves upon any blessing, rather as it is the bounty of heaven, than the acquisition of our own prudence.”

— Joseph Addison

419. “Knavery is ever suspicious of knavery.”

— Joseph Addison

420. “Peaceable times are the best to live in, though not so proper to furnish materials for a writer.”

— Joseph Addison

421. “It is wonderful to see persons of sense passing away a dozen hours together in shuffling and dividing a pack of cards.”

— Joseph Addison

422. “It is odd to consider the connection between despotism and barbarity, and how the making one person more than man makes the rest less.”

— Joseph Addison

423. “Though a man has all other perfections, and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life.”

— Joseph Addison

424. “Should a writer single out and point his raillery at particular persons, or satirize the miserable, he might be sure of pleasing a great part of his readers, but must be a very ill man if he could please himself.”

— Joseph Addison

425. “The moral perfections of the Deity, the more attentively, we consider, the more perfectly still shall we know them.”

— Joseph Addison

426. “Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.”

— Joseph Addison

427. “I never knew a critic who made it his business to lash the faults of other writers that was not guilty of greater himself – as the hangman is generally a worse malefactor than the criminal that suffers by his hand.”

— Joseph Addison

428. “A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.”

— Joseph Addison

429. “A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.”

— Joseph Addison

430. “The Fear of Death often proves Mortal.”

— Joseph Addison

431. “That courage which arises from the sense of our duty, and from the fear of offending Him that made us, acts always in a uniform manner, and according to the dictates of right reason.”

— Joseph Addison

432. “There is no greater sign of a bad cause, than when the patrons of it are reduced to the necessity of making use of the most wicked artifices to support it.”

— Joseph Addison

433. “Nothing is so much admired, and so little understood, as wit.”

— Joseph Addison

434. “Facts are plain spoken; hopes and figures are its aversion.”

— Joseph Addison

435. “God discovers the martyr and confessor without the trial of flames and tortures, and will hereafter entitle many to the reward of actions which they had never the opportunity of performing.”

— Joseph Addison

436. “O ye powers that search The heart of man, and weigh his inmost thoughts, If I have done amiss, impute it not! The best may err, but you are good.”

— Joseph Addison

437. “A man’s reputation draws eyes upon him that will narrowly inspect every part of him.”

— Joseph Addison

438. “Among those evils which befall us, there are many which have been more painful to us in the prospect than by their actual pressure.”

— Joseph Addison

439. “Who does not more admire Cicero as an author than as a consul of Rome?”

— Joseph Addison

440. “Government mitigates the inequality of power, and makes an innocent man, though of the lowest rank, a match for the mightiest of his fellow-subjects.”

— Joseph Addison

441. “Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”

— Joseph Addison

442. “Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow of a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the violence of torrents, nor demolished by the force of armies.”

— Joseph Addison

443. “Decius A style like this becomes a conqueror. Cato Decius, a style like this becomes a Roman. Decius What is a Roman, that is Caesar’s foe? 40 Cato Greater than Caesar: he’s a friend to virtue.”

— Joseph Addison

444. “When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations.”

— Joseph Addison

445. “Whoe’er is brave and virtuous, is a Roman.”

— Joseph Addison