Joseph Addison

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.
Joseph Addison

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
Joseph Addison

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Joseph Addison

Plenty of people wish to become devout, but no one wishes to be humble.
Joseph Addison

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

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.
Joseph Addison

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Joseph Addison

Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.
Joseph Addison

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

What pity is it That we can die, but once to serve our country.
Joseph Addison

Young men soon give, and soon forget, affronts; old age is slow in both.
Joseph Addison

Some virtues are only seen in affliction and others only in prosperity.
Joseph Addison

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.
Joseph Addison

One should take good care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life as laughter.
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

True happiness 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.
Joseph Addison

We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.
Joseph Addison

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.
Joseph Addison

Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.
Joseph Addison

He who would pass his declining years 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

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: “What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.”
Joseph Addison

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.
Joseph Addison

Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor.
Joseph Addison

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.
Joseph Addison

Jesters do often prove prophets.
Joseph Addison

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.
Joseph Addison

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
Joseph Addison

Cheerfulness is the best promoter of health and is as friendly to the mind as to the body.
Joseph Addison

Mere bashfulness without merit is awkwardness.
Joseph Addison