Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was an English essayist, poet, dramatist, and Whig politician. He is renowned for his unornamented prose style, which marked the end of the mannered and extravagant writing of the 17th century.
Born in Milston, Wiltshire, Addison was educated at Charterhouse, Queen’s College, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became a fellow. Addison found favor with the Whigs after he published The Campaign (1705,) a poem celebrating Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim. Appointed under-secretary of state in 1706, he served as the Member of Parliament for Lostwithiel 1708–19, and became secretary of state 1717–18.
Addison’s close friendship with the writer Richard Steele and the satirist Jonathan Swift led to his involvement in the Tatler magazine 1709–10. Addison is best known for his contributions to Steele’s daily newspaper The Spectator. Addison’s aesthetics as essays had a significant influence on eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, specifically on Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant’s accounts of the sublime.
Addison was also famous as the author of Cato (1713,) a play that enjoyed tremendous popularity in both Britain and America for its depiction of patriotism and stoical virtue.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Joseph Addison
Music is the only sensual gratification in which mankind may indulge to excess without injury to their moral or religious feelings.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Music
The true happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self; and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions; it loves shade and solitude, and naturally haunts groves and fountains, fields and meadows; in short, it feels everything it wants within itself, and receives no addition from multitudes of witnesses and spectators. On the contrary, false happiness loves to be in a crowd, and to draw the eyes of the world upon her. She does not receive satisfaction from the applauses which she gives herself, but from the admiration which she raises in others. She flourishes in courts and palaces, theatres and assemblies, and has no existence but when she is looked upon.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Enjoyment, Happiness, Friendship
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
Topics: Justice
The voice of reason is more to be regarded than the bent of any present inclination; since inclination will at length come over to reason, though we can never force reason to comply with inclination.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Reason
To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Solitude
People of gloomy, uncheerful imaginations, will discover their natural tincture of mind in all their thoughts, words, and actions. As the finest wines have often the taste of the soil, so even the most religious thoughts often draw something that is peculiar from the constitution of the mind in which they arise. When folly or superstition strikes in with this natural depravity of temper, it is not in the power, even of religion itself, to preserve the character from appearing highly absurd and ridiculous.
—Joseph Addison
In the school of Pythagoras it was a point of discipline, that if among the probationers, there were any who grew weary of studying to be useful, and returned to an idle life, they were to regard them as dead; and, upon their departing, to perform their obsequies, and raise them tombs with inscriptions, to warn others of the like mortality, and quicken them to refine their souls above that wretched state.
—Joseph Addison
Content has a kindly influence on the soul of man, in respect of every being to whom he stands related. It extinguishes all murmuring, repining, and ingratitude toward that Being who has allotted us our part to act in the world. It destroys all inordinate ambition; gives sweetness to the conversation, and serenity to all the thoughts; and if it does not bring riches, it does the same thing by banishing the desire of them.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Contentment
Man is the merriest, the most joyous of all the species of creation.—Above and below him all are serious.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Joy
There is a sort of economy in Providence that one shall excel where another is defective, in order to make them more useful to each other, and mix them in society.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Society
There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Unhappiness, One liners, Fame
It very seldom happens that a man is slow enough in assuming the character of a husband, or a woman quick enough in condescending to that of a wife.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Wife
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
Topics: Religion
Fables take off from the severity of instruction, and enforce at the same time that they conceal it.
—Joseph Addison
He who would pass the declining years of his life with honor and comfort should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember, when he is old, that he has once been young.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Aging, Age
The humor of turning every misfortune into a judgment, proceeds from wrong notions of religion, which, in its own nature, produces good will toward men, and puts the mildest construction upon every accident that befalls them. In this case, therefore, it is not religion that sours a man’s temper, but it is his temper that sours his religion.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Misfortune
Every man is ready to give in a long catalogue of those virtues and good qualities he expects to find in the person of a friend; but very few of us are careful to cultivate them in ourselves.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Virtue
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
Topics: Unhappiness, Happiness
We are always doing, says he, “something for posterity, but I would see posterity do something for us.”
—Joseph Addison
Topics: History, Posterity
Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Authority
Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Life, One liners
A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world; and if, in the present life, his happiness arises from the subduing of his desires, it will arise in the next from the gratification of them.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Contentment
Hudibras has defined nonsense, as Cowley does wit, by negatives. Nonsense, says he, is that which is neither true nor false. These two great properties of nonsense, which are essential to it, give it such a peculiar advantage over all other writings, that it is incapable of being either answered or contradicted. If it affirms anything, you cannot lay hold of it; or if it denies, you cannot refute it. In a word, there are greater depths and obscurities, greater intricacies and perplexities in an elaborate and well-written piece of nonsense, than in the most abstruse and profound tract of school divinity.
—Joseph Addison
There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Consequences, Foresight
The man who will live above his present circumstances, is in great danger of soon living much beneath them; or as the Italian proverb says, “The man that lives by hope, will die by despair.”
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Economy
Punning is a conceit arising from the use of two words that agree in the sound, but differ in the sense. 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 pronounce it true; but if it vanishes in the experiment, you may conclude it to have been a pun.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Wit
A great deal of knowledge, which is not capable of making a man wise, has natural tendency to make him vain and arrogant.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Knowledge
To be an atheist requires an infinitely greater measure of faith than to receive all the great truths which atheism would deny.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Atheism
A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants and how much more unhappy he might be than he really is.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Blessings, Happiness
God discovers the martyr and confessor without the trial of flames and tortures, and will thereafter entitle many to the reward of actions which they never had the opportunity of performing.
—Joseph Addison
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