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
Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Time Management, Time
It must be a prospect pleasing to God to see his creatures forever drawing nearer to him by greater degrees of resemblance.
—Joseph Addison
A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of; it heightens all the virtues which it accompanies; like the shades in paintings, it raises and rounds every figure and makes the colors more beautiful, though not so glaring as they would be without.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Humility, Modesty
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Literature, Books, Reading
If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother and hope your guardian genius.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Resolve, Friendship, Perseverance, Success, Endurance
Let freedom never perish in your hands.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Freedom
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 sense of honour is of so fine and delicate a nature, that it is only to be met with in minds which are naturally noble, or in such as have been cultivated by good examples, or a refined education.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Honor
Nothing lies on our hands with such uneasiness as time. Wretched and thoughtless creatures! In the only place where covetousness were a virtue we turn prodigals.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Time
Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Jealousy
Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: One liners, Life
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
Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above or below him are serious.
—Joseph Addison
Physic is, for the most part, only a substitute for temperance and exercise.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Medicine
Nature has sometimes made a fool; but a coxcomb is always of a man’s own making.
—Joseph Addison
I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Despair
Advertisements are of great use to the vulgar. First of all, as they are instruments of ambition. A man that is by no means big enough for the Gazette, may easily creep into the advertisements; by which means we often see an apothecary in the same paper of news with a plenipotentiary, or a running footman with an ambassador.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Advertising
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
The pleasantest part of a man’s life is generally that which passes in courtship, provided his passion be sincere, and the party beloved, kind, with discretion. Love, desire, hope, all the pleasing motions of the soul, rise in the pursuit.
—Joseph Addison
Our delight in any particular study, art, or science rises and improves in proportion to the application which we bestow upon it. Thus, what was at first an exercise becomes at length an entertainment.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Learning, Study, Perseverance
Complaisance renders a superior amiable, an equal agreeable, and an inferior acceptable. It smoothes distinction, sweetens conversation, and makes every one in the company pleased with himself. It produces good nature and mutual benevolence, encourages the timorous, soothes the turbulent, humanizes the fierce, and distinguishes a society of civilized persons from a confusion of savages.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Manners
Contentment produces, in some measure, all those effects which the alchemist ascribes to what he calls the philosopher’s stone; and if it does not bring riches, it does the same thing by banishing the desire of them. If it cannot remove the disquietudes arising from a man’s mind, body, or fortune, it makes him easy under them.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Contentment
Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful.
—Joseph Addison
When a woman comes to her glass, she does not employ her time in making herself look more advantageously what she really is, but endeavours to be as much another creature as she possibly can. Whether this happens because they stay so long and attend their work so diligently that they forget the faces and persons which they first sat down with, or whatever it is, they seldom rise from the toilet the same woman they appeared when they began to dress.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Women
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul. The philosopher, the saint, the hero, the wise, and the good, or the great, very often lie hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred and brought to light.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Education
The disease of jealously is so malignant that is converts all it takes into its own nourishment.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Jealousy
Health and cheerfulness naturally beget each other.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Health
To look upon the soul as going on from strength to strength, to consider that she is to shine forever with new accessions of glory, and brighten to all eternity; that she will be still adding virtue to virtue, and knowledge to knowledge,—carries in it something wonderfully agreeable to that ambition which is natural to the mind of man.
—Joseph Addison
Topics: Soul
Singularity is laudable, when in contradiction to a multitude, it adheres to the dictates of morality and honor. In concerns of this kind it is to be looked upon as heroic bravery, in which a man leaves the species only as he soars above it.
—Joseph Addison
Quick sensitiveness is inseparable from a ready understanding.
—Joseph Addison
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