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A reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black man or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor.

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
Fair
Reader
Married
Bachelor
Writer
Bachelors
Pleasure
Mild
Whether
Disposition
Black
Seldom
Book
Fairs

More quotes by Joseph Addison

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Among the writers of antiquity there are none who instruct us more openly in the manners of their respective times in which they lived than those who have employed themselves in satire, under whatever dress it may appear.
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Waning moons their settled periods keep, to swell the billows and ferment the deep.
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Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.
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Thy steady temper, Portius, Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud, and Cæsar, In the calm lights of mild philosophy.
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Sir Francis Bacon observed that a well-written book, compared with its rivals and antagonists, is like Moses' serpent, that immediately swallowed up and devoured those of the Egyptians.
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Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!
Joseph Addison
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There is no passion that steals into the heart more imperceptibly and covers itself under more disguises than pride.
Joseph Addison
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The English Writers of Tragedy are possessed with a Notion, that when they represent a virtuous or innocent Person in Distress, they ought not to leave him till they have delivered him out of his Troubles, or made him triumph over his Enemies.
Joseph Addison
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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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There are no more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants. They knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good offices, distribute the gifts of Nature, find work for the poor, and wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great.
Joseph Addison
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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
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My voice is still for war.
Joseph Addison
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Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
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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A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and should make a due discrimination between those that are and those that are not the proper objects of it.
Joseph Addison
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A misery is not to be measure from the nature of the evil but from the temper of the sufferer.
Joseph Addison
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Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.
Joseph Addison
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I have often reflected within myself on this unaccountable humor in womankind of being smitten with everything that is showy and superficial, and on the numberless evils that befall the sex from this light fantastical disposition.
Joseph Addison
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Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought.
Joseph Addison
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The man who lives by hope, will die by hunger.
Joseph Addison