Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Political
Differ
May
Believes
Wells
Stupid
Well
Side
Must
Principles
Believe
Honest
Men
Virtue
Uncharitable
Sides
Excessively

More quotes by Joseph Addison

Image
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.
Joseph Addison
Image
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
Image
Wine heightens indifference into love, love into jealousy, and jealousy into madness. It often turns the good-natured man into an idiot, and the choleric into an assassin. It gives bitterness to resentment, it makes vanity insupportable, and displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.
Joseph Addison
Image
Health and happiness give rise to each other.
Joseph Addison
Image
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
Image
Among the English authors, Shakespeare has incomparably excelled all others. That noble extravagance of fancy, which he had in so great perfection, thoroughly qualified him to touch the weak, superstitious part of his readers' imagination, and made him capable of succeeding where he had nothing to support him besides the strength of his own genius.
Joseph Addison
Image
Upon laying a weight in one of the scales, inscribed eternity, though I threw in that of time, prosperity, affliction, wealth, and poverty, which seemed very ponderous, they were not able to stir the opposite balance.
Joseph Addison
Image
The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.
Joseph Addison
Image
To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.
Joseph Addison
Image
Faith is kept alive in us, and gathers strength, more from practice than from speculations.
Joseph Addison
Image
There is nobody so weak of invention that cannot make some little stories to villify his enemy.
Joseph Addison
Image
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
Image
Love is a second life it grows into the soul, warms every vein, and beats in every pulse.
Joseph Addison
Image
The care of our national commerce redounds more to the riches and prosperity of the public than any other act of government.
Joseph Addison
Image
Nature is full of wonders every atom is a standing miracle, and endowed with such qualities, as could not be impressed on it by a power and wisdom less than infinite.
Joseph Addison
Image
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.
Joseph Addison
Image
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.
Joseph Addison
Image
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
Image
There is nothing in which men more deceive themselves than in what they call zeal.
Joseph Addison
Image
If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend.
Joseph Addison