Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
Joseph Addison
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Often
Ideas
Lively
Wells
Description
Chosen
Well
Sight
Giving
Gives
Great
Words
Things
Force
More quotes by Joseph Addison
Every passion gives a particular cast to the countenance, and is apt to discover itself in some feature or other. I have seen an eye curse for half an hour together, and an eyebrow call a man a scoundrel.
Joseph Addison
I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as a habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent.
Joseph Addison
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
The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.
Joseph Addison
When a man is made up wholly of the dove, without the least grain of the serpent in his composition, he becomes ridiculous in many circumstances of life, and very often discredits his best actions.
Joseph Addison
Sweet are the slumbers of the virtuous man.
Joseph Addison
There is no passion that steals into the heart more imperceptibly and covers itself under more disguises than pride.
Joseph Addison
A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.
Joseph Addison
Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition.
Joseph Addison
The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.
Joseph Addison
Men who cherish for women the highest respect are seldom popular with them.
Joseph Addison
Should a writer single out and point his raillery at particular persons, or satirize the miserable, he might be sure of pleasing a great part of his readers, but must be a very ill man if he could please himself.
Joseph Addison
The passion for praise, which is so very vehement in the fair sex, produces excellent effects in women of sense, who desire to be admired for that which only deserves admiration.
Joseph Addison
That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?
Joseph Addison
The care of our national commerce redounds more to the riches and prosperity of the public than any other act of government.
Joseph Addison
If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend.
Joseph Addison
Instability of temper ought to be checked when it disposes men to wander from one scheme to another: since such a fickleness cannot but be attended with fatal consequences.
Joseph Addison
To look upon the soul as going on from strength to strength, to consider that she is to shine forever with new accessions of glory, and brighten to all eternity that she will be still adding virtue to virtue, and knowledge to knowledge,--carries in it something wonderfully agreeable to that ambition which is natural to the mind of man.
Joseph Addison
Cleanliness may be defined to be the emblem of purity of mind.
Joseph Addison
The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease.
Joseph Addison