Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison
Joseph Addisonwas an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician. He was the eldest son of The Reverend Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth1 May 1672
memories animal may
The memory is perpetually looking back when we have nothing present to entertain us. It is like those repositories in animals that are filled with food, on which they may ruminate when their present pastures fail.
modesty virtue
Virtue which shuns, the day.
morality observance
There is nothing which strengthens faith more than the observance of morality.
writing two giving
Hudibras has defined nonsense, as Cowley does wit, by negatives. Nonsense, he says, is that which is neither true nor false. These two great properties of nonsense, which are always essential to it, give it such a peculiar advantage over all other writings, that it is incapable of being either answered or contradicted.
silly opportunity men
Learning, like traveling and all other methods of improvement, as it finishes good sense, so it makes a silly man ten thousand times more insufferable by supplying variety of matter to his impertinence, and giving him an opportunity of abounding in absurdities.
hypocrisy pedants form
Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy inn religion--a form of knowledge without the power of it.
generous-spirit despair cows
Poverty palls the most generous spirits; it cows industry, and casts resolution itself into despair.
beauty discovery joy
The very first discovery of beauty strikes the mind with an inward joy, and spreads a cheerfulness and delight through all its faculties.
god discovery perfection
A source of cheerfulness to a good mind is the consideration of that Being on whom we have our dependence, and in whom, though we behold Him as yet but in the first faint discoveries of His perfections, we see everything that we can imagine as great glorious, or amiable. We find ourselves everywhere upheld by His goodness and surrounded by an immensity of love and mercy.
god folly supreme
It is folly to seek the approbation of any being besides the Supreme.
god perfection deities
The moral perfections of the Deity, the more attentively, we consider, the more perfectly still shall we know them.
mind action good-intentions
It is of unspeakable advantage to possess our minds with an habitual good intention, and to aim all our thoughts, words, and actions at some laudable end.
humility exercise greatness
A contemplation of God's works, a generous concern for the good of mankind, and the unfeigned exercise of humility only, denominate men great and glorious.
greatness soul looks
A solid and substantial greatness of soul looks down with neglect on the censures and applauses of the multitude.