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I am very much concerned when I see young gentlemen of fortune and quality so wholly set upon pleasures and diversions, that they neglect all those improvements in wisdom and knowledge which may make them easy to themselves and useful to the world.

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
Make
Quality
Pleasures
World
Pleasure
Neglect
Knowledge
Gentleman
Upon
Improvement
Diversions
Easy
Useful
Improvements
Young
Fortune
Diversion
May
Concerned
Gentlemen
Much
Wisdom
Wholly

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The Lord my pasture shall prepare, And feed me with a shepherd's care His presence shall my wants supply, And guard me with a watchful eye.
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Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.
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A virtuous mind in a fair body is indeed a fine picture in a good light, and therefore it is no wonder that it makes the beautiful sex all over charms.
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Health and cheerfulness naturally beget each other.
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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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There is no greater sign of a bad cause, than when the patrons of it are reduced to the necessity of making use of the most wicked artifices to support it.
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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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Others proclaim the infirmities of a great man with satisfaction and complacence, if they discover none of the like in themselves.
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If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. He has a heart capable of mirth, and naturally disposed to it.
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Most of the trades, professions, and ways of living among mankind, take their original either from the love of the pleasure, or the fear of want. The former, when it becomes too violent, degenerates into luxury, and the latter into avarice.
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Faith is kept alive in us, and gathers strength, more from practice than from speculations.
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Physic is, for the most part, only a substitute for temperance and exercise.
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Whether dark presages of the night proceed from any latent power of the soul during her abstraction, or from any operation of subordinate spirits, has been a dispute.
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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.
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Ridicule is generally made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything praiseworthy in human life.
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The Fashionable World is grown free and easie our Manners sit more loose upon us: Nothing is so modish as an agreeable Negligence. In a word, Good Breeding shows it self most, where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least.
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There is nothing more requisite in business than despatch.
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The head has the most beautiful appearance, as well as the highest station, in a human figure.
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Music is the only sensual gratification which mankind may indulge in to excess without injury to their moral or religious feelings.
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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.
Joseph Addison