Sir Richard Steele (1672–1729,) pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff, Irish essayist, dramatist, journalist, and politician. Considered the father of journalism, he is best known as a principal author (with Joseph Addison) of the periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator.
Born in Dublin, Steele was educated at Charterhouse, where Joseph Addison was a contemporary, and Merton College, Oxford. Steele entered the army as a cadet in the Life Guards and wrote the dramas The Funeral (1701,) The Lying Lover (1703,) and The Tender Husband (1705.) He subsequently became the writer of The London Gazette, the official government journal.
Steele started the Tatler, published thrice-weekly 1709–11, and wrote almost all of the content. Started as a newspaper to feed the arguments of “coffee-house politicians,” it soon became a compendium of gossip, reviews, contemporary satire, and energetic social and moral essays, with intermittent articles on literature.
With Addison Steele also founded The Spectator (1711–12) and The Guardian (s.1743.) He briefly entered parliament (1713.)
University of North Carolina English professor Richmond Pugh Bond wrote the biography The Tatler (1972.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Richard Steele
It is certainly a very important lesson, to learn how to enjoy ordinary things, and to be able to relish your being, without the transport of some passion, or the gratification of some appetite.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Moderation
The insupportable labor of doing nothing.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Idleness, Laziness
A man endowed with great perfections, without good-breeding, is like one who has his pockets full of gold, but always wants change for his ordinary occasions.
—Richard Steele
A little in drink, but at all times your faithful husband.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Husbands, Marriage
A modest person seldom fails to gain the good will of those he converses with, because nobody envies a man who does not appear to be pleased with himself.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Modesty
Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Praise
Human nature is not so much depraved as to hinder us from respecting goodness in others, though we ourselves want it. We love truth too well to resist the charms of sincerity.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Humanity
I consider the soul of man as the ruin of a glorious pile of buildings; where, amidst great heaps of rubbish, you meet with noble fragments of sculpture, broken pillars and obelisks, and a magnificence in confusion.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Soul
Tradition is not a fetish to be prayed to-but a useful record of experiences. Time should bring improvement-but not all old things are worthless. We are served by both the moderns and the ancients. The balanced man is he who clings to the best in the old-and appropriates the desirable in the new.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Generations
Indolence, methinks, is an intermediate state between pleasure and pain, and very much unbecoming any part of our life after we are out of the nurse’s arms.
—Richard Steele
Conversation never sits easier than when we now and then discharge ourselves in a symphony of laughter; which may not improperly be called the chorus of conversation.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Laughter
There is nothing which must end, to be valued for its continuance. If hours, days, months, and years pass away, it is no matter what hour, day, month, or year we die. The applause of a good actor is due to him at whatever scene of the play he makes his exit. It is thus in the life of a man of sense; a short life is sufficient to manifest himself a man of honor and virtue; when he ceases to be such, he has lived too long, and while he is such, it is of no consequence to him how long he shall be so, provided he is so to his life’s end.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Life
A favor well bestowed is almost as great an honor to him who confers it as to him who receives it.
—Richard Steele
Nothing is more silly than the pleasure some people take in “speaking their minds.” A man of this make will say a rude thing, for the mere pleasure of saying it, when an opposite behavior, full as innocent, might have preserved his friend, or made his fortune.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Speech
This portable quality of good humor seasons all the parts and occurrences we meet with in such a manner that there are no moments lost, but they all pass with so much satisfaction that the heaviest of loads, when it is a load, that of time, is never felt by us.
—Richard Steele
To have good sense and ability to express it are the most essential and necessary qualities in companions. When thoughts rise in us fit to utter among familiar friends, there needs but very little care in clothing them.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Style
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Beauty
Extinguish vanity in the mind, and you naturally retrench the little superfluities of garniture and equipage. The blossoms will fall of themselves when the root that nourishes them is destroyed.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Vanity
A man advanced in years, who thinks fit to look back upon his former life, and call that only life which was passed with satisfaction and enjoyment, will find himself very young, if not in his infancy.
—Richard Steele
I know no evil so great as the abuse of the understanding, and yet there is no one vice more common.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Understanding
I was going home two hours ago, but was met by Mr. Griffith, who has kept me ever since… . I will come within a pint of wine.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Wine
The marriage state, with and without the affection suitable to it, is the completest image of Heaven and Hell we are capable of receiving in this life.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Marriage
A wag is in the last order even of pretenders to wit and humor.—Generally he has his mind prepared to receive some occasion of merriment, but is of himself too empty to draw any out of his own thoughts, and therefore he laughs at the next thing he meets, not because it is ridiculous, but because he is under the necessity of laughing.
—Richard Steele
The most necessary talent in a man of conversation, which is what we ordinarily intend by a gentleman, is a good judgment. He that has this in perfection is master of his companion, without letting him see it; and has the same advantage over men of other qualifications, as one that can see would have over a blind man of ten times his strength.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Judgment
That man never grows old who keeps a child in his heart.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Age, Aging
There is nothing that wears out a fine face like the vigils of the card-table, and those cutting passions which naturally attend them. Hollow eyes, haggard looks, and pale complexions are the natural indications of a female gamester. Her morning sleeps are not able to repay her midnight watchings.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Gambling
Of all the affections which attend human life, the love of glory is the most ardent.
—Richard Steele
It is wonderful that so many shall entertain those with whom they converse by giving them the history of their pains and aches; and imagine such narrations their quota of the conversation. This is, of all other, the meanest help to discourse, and a man must not think at all, or think himself very insignifificant when he finds an account of his headache answered by another’s asking what is the news in the last mail.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Conversation
Men are not altered by their circumstances, but as they give them opportunities of exerting what they are in themselves; and a powerful clown is a tyrant in the most ugly form in which he can possibly appear.
—Richard Steele
I have often lamented that we cannot close our ears with as much ease as we can our eyes.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Silence
When one has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Brevity, Truth
As ceremony is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance, so good-breeding is an expedient to make fools and wise men equal.
—Richard Steele
Zeal for the public good is the characteristic of a man of honor and a gentleman, and must take place of pleasures, profits, and all other private gratifications. Whoever wants this motive, is an open enemy, or an inglorious neuter to mankind, in proportion to the misapplied advantages with which nature and fortune have blessed him.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Zeal
Equality is the life of conversation; and he is as much out who assumes to himself any part above another, as he who considers himself below the rest of society.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Equality
The highest point of good-breeding is to show a very nice regard to your own dignity, and with that in your own heart, to express your value for the man above you.
—Richard Steele
Lies which are told out of arrogance and ostentation, a man should detect in his own defense, because he should not be triumphed over. Lies which are told out of malice he should expose, both for his own sake and that of the rest of mankind, because every man should rise against a common enemy; but the officious liar, many have argued, is to be excused, because it does some man good, and no man hurt.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Lying
Allow no man to be so free with you as to praise you to your face.—Your vanity, by this means, will want its food, but at the same time your passion for esteem will be more fully gratified; men will praise you in their actions; where you now receive one compliment, you will then receive twenty civilities.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Praise, Flattery
Pleasure, when it is a man’s chief purpose, disappoints itself; and the constant application to it palls the faculty of enjoying it, and leaves the sense of our inability for that we wish, with a disrelish of everything else. Thus the intermediate seasons of the man of pleasure are more heavy than one would impose upon the vilest criminal.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Pleasure
Fire and sword are but slow engines of destruction in comparison with the babbler.
—Richard Steele
Topics: Gossip
An inquisitive man is a creature naturally very vacant of thought itself, and therefore forced to apply to foreign assistance.
—Richard Steele
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