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An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience.

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
Audience
Indolent
Attention
Gratify
Keep
Lavish
May
Decoration
Opera
Senses
Allowed
Extravagantly
Design
Decorations

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Marriage enlarges the scene of our happiness and miseries. A marriage of love is pleasant a marriage of interest, easy and a marriage where both meet, happy. A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendship, all the enjoyments of sense and reason, and, indeed, all the sweets of life.
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The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers, And heavily in clouds brings on the day, The great, the important day, big with the fate Of Cato and of Rome.
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Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible.
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An honest man, that is not quite sober, has nothing to fear.
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Guard thy heart on this weak side, where most our nature fails.
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Love, anger, pride and avarice all visibly move in those little orbs.
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When a man has been guilty of any vice or folly, the best atonement he can make for it is to warn others not to fall into the like.
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How is it possible for those who are men of honor in their persons, thus to become notorious liars in their party
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Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.
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If there's a power above us, (And that there is all nature cries aloud Through all her works,) he must delight in virtue.
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I never knew a critic who made it his business to lash the faults of other writers that was not guilty of greater himself--as the hangman is generally a worse malefactor than the criminal that suffers by his hand.
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A perfect tragedy is the noblest production of human nature.
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What an absurd thing it is to pass over all the valuable parts of a man, and fix our attention on his infirmities.
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I have often wondered that learning is not thought a proper ingredient in the education of a woman of quality or fortune. Since they have the same improvable minds as the male part of their species.
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A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.
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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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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.
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We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of art.
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In private conversation between intimate friends, the wisest men very often talk like the weakest : for indeed the talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.
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It is the privilege of posterity to set matters right between those antagonists who, by their rivalry for greatness, divided a whole age.
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