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Contentment produces, in some measure, all those effects which the alchemist usually ascribes to what he calls the philosopher's stone and if it does not bring riches, it does the same thing by banishing the desire for them.

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
Stones
Alchemist
Usually
Produces
Effects
Contentment
Produce
Calls
Bring
Riches
Desire
Stone
Doe
Philosopher
Banishing
Thing
Measure
Ascribes

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Artificial intelligence will never be a match for natural stupidity.
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If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.
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Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.
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In the founders of great families, titles or attributes of honor are generally correspondent with the virtues of the person to whom they are applied but in their descendants they are too often the marks rather of grandeur than of merit. The stamp and denomination still continue, but the intrinsic value is frequently lost.
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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.
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For my own part, I am apt to join in the opinion with those who believe that all the regions of Nature swarm with spirits, and that we have multitudes of spectators on all our actions when we think ourselves most alone.
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Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.
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A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.
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Mere bashfulness without merit is awkwardness.
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Our friends don't see our faults, or conceal them, or soften them.
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A misery is not to be measure from the nature of the evil but from the temper of the sufferer.
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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.
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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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Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.
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Nothing that isn't a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconsistency.
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It is indeed very possible, that the Persons we laugh at may in the main of their Characters be much wiser Men than our selves but if they would have us laugh at them, they must fall short of us in those Respects which stir up this Passion.
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Misery and ignorance are always the cause of great evils. Misery is easily excited to anger, and ignorance soon yields to perfidious counsels.
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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.
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There is nothing which we receive with so much reluctance as advice.
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