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Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honoris a private station.

Joseph Addison

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Joseph Addison
Age: 47 †
Born: 1672
Born: May 1
Died: 1719
Died: June 17
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Librettist
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Writer
Milston
Wiltshire
Joseph Addisson
Right Hon. Joseph Addison
Men
Vice
Prevails
Vices
Sway
Content
Station
Bear
Thyself
Private
Stations
Bears
Honour
Honor
Post
Obscurely
Good
Posts
Impious

More quotes by Joseph Addison

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Upon laying a weight in one of the scales, inscribed eternity, though I threw in that of time, prosperity, affliction, wealth, and poverty, which seemed very ponderous, they were not able to stir the opposite balance.
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There is nobody so weak of invention that cannot make some little stories to villify his enemy.
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A man governs himself by the dictates of virtue and good sense, who acts without zeal or passion in points that are of no consequence but when the whole community is shaken, and the safety of the public endangered, the appearance of a philosophical or an affected indolence must arise either from stupidity or perfidiousness.
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Modesty is not only an ornament, but also a guard to virtue.
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Men naturally warm and heady are transported with the greatest flush of good-nature.
Joseph Addison
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Nature in her whole drama never drew such a part she has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man's own making.
Joseph Addison
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Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul.
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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
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Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth.
Joseph Addison
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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.
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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
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Mankind are more indebted to industry than ingenuity the gods set up their favors at a price, and industry is the purchaser.
Joseph Addison
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Marriage enlarges the Scene of our Happiness and Miseries.
Joseph Addison
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A man with great talents, but void of discretion, is like Polyphemus in the fable, strong and blind, endued with an irresistible force, which for want of sight is of no use to him.
Joseph Addison
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If men would consider not so much wherein they differ, as wherein they agree, there would be far less of uncharitableness and angry feeling in the world.
Joseph Addison
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Justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is always, therefore, represented as blind.
Joseph Addison
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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
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The consciousness of being loved softens the keenest pang even at the moment of parting yea, even the eternal farewell is robbed of half of its bitterness when uttered in accents that breathe love to the last sigh.
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A thousand trills and quivering sounds In airy circles o'er us fly, Till, wafted by a gentle breeze, They faint and languish by degrees, And at a distance die.
Joseph Addison
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Those Marriages generally abound most with Love and Constancy, that are preceded by a long Courtship.
Joseph Addison