Joseph Addison Quotes

There is nothing we receive with so much reluctance as advice.

~ Joseph Addison

- The Spectator, Oct 12, 1712

Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

~ Joseph Addison

Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.

~ Joseph Addison

To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.

~ Joseph Addison

Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion.

~ Joseph Addison

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

~ Joseph Addison

It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

~ Joseph Addison

There is no greater sign of a general decay of virtue in a nation, than a want of zeal in its inhabitants for the good of their country.

~ Joseph Addison

Courage that grows from constitution often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it courage which arises from a sense of duty acts in a uniform manner.

~ Joseph Addison

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

~ Joseph Addison

The man who will live above his present circumstances, is in great danger of soon living beneath them; or as the Italian proverb says, "The man that lives by hope, will die by despair."

~ Joseph Addison

When a man becomes familiar with his goddess, she quickly sinks into a woman.

~ Joseph Addison

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

~ Joseph Addison

Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor.

~ Joseph Addison

Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.

~ Joseph Addison

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

Young men soon give, and soon forget affronts,
Old age is slow in both.

~ Joseph Addison