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

More quotes by Joseph Addison

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Beauty commonly produces love, but cleanliness preserves it. Age itself is not unamiable while it is preserved clean and unsullied like a piece of metal constantly kept smooth and bright, we look on it with more pleasure than on a new vessel cankered with rust.
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By anticipation we sugar misery and enjoy happiness before they are in being. We can set the sun and stars forward, or lose sight of them by wandering into those retired parts of eternity when the heavens and earth shall be no more.
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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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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.
Joseph Addison
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Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought.
Joseph Addison
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One of the most important but one of the most difficult things for a powerful mind is to be its own master.
Joseph Addison
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There is nobody so weak of invention that cannot make some little stories to villify his enemy.
Joseph Addison
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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
Joseph Addison
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Good Nature, and Evenness of Temper, will give you an easie Companion for Life Vertue and good Sense, an agreeable Friend Love and Constancy, a good Wife or Husband. Where we meet one Person with all these Accomplishments, we find an Hundred without any one of them.
Joseph Addison
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The world is so full of ill-nature that I have lampoons sent me by people who cannot spell, and satires composed by those who scarce know how to write.
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The moral perfections of the Deity, the more attentively, we consider, the more perfectly still shall we know them.
Joseph Addison
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The man who lives by hope, will die by hunger.
Joseph Addison
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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
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Among those evils which befall us, there are many which have been more painful to us in the prospect than by their actual pressure.
Joseph Addison
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When I read the rules of criticism, I immediately inquire after the works of the author who has written them, and by that means discover what it is he likes in a composition.
Joseph Addison
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It is impossible for authors to discover beauties in one another's works they have eyes only for spots and blemishes.
Joseph Addison
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Waning moons their settled periods keep, to swell the billows and ferment the deep.
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.
Joseph Addison
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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.
Joseph Addison
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Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly.
Joseph Addison