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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.

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
Earth
Forward
Anticipation
Lose
Sugar
Loses
Wander
Shall
Misery
Stars
Parts
Heaven
Eternity
Wandering
Happiness
Sun
Heavens
Enjoy
Sight
Retired

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Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin!
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Government mitigates the inequality of power, and makes an innocent man, though of the lowest rank, a match for the mightiest of his fellow-subjects.
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Poverty palls the most generous spirits it cows industry, and casts resolution itself into despair.
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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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But in all despotic governments, though a particular prince may favour arts and letter, there is a natural degeneracy of mankind.
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Some virtues are only seen in affliction and others only in prosperity.
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Marriage enlarges the Scene of our Happiness and Miseries.
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Knavery is ever suspicious of knavery.
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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.
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The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease.
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There is nothing more requisite in business than despatch.
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I have often reflected within myself on this unaccountable humor in womankind of being smitten with everything that is showy and superficial, and on the numberless evils that befall the sex from this light fantastical disposition.
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It generally takes its rise either from an ill-will to mankind, a private inclination to make ourselves esteemed, an ostentation of wit, and vanity of being thought in the secrets of the world or from a desire of gratifying any of these dispositions of mind in those persons with whom we converse.
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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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A reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black man or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor.
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T is liberty crowns Britannia's Isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile.
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Sweet are the slumbers of the virtuous man.
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Husband a lie, and trump it up in some extraordinary emergency.
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A man governs himself by the dictates of virtue and good sense, who acts without zeal or passion in points that are of no consequence but when the whole community is shaken, and the safety of the public endangered, the appearance of a philosophical or an affected indolence must arise either from stupidity or perfidiousness.
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Among the several kinds of beauty, the eye takes most delight in colors.
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