Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison
Joseph Addisonwas an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician. He was the eldest son of The Reverend Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth1 May 1672
fate waiting judgment
On you, my lord, with anxious fear I wait, and from your judgment must expect my fate.
hands law giving
A well regulated commerce is not, like law, physic, or divinity, to be overstocked with hands; but, on the contrary, flourishes by multitudes, and gives employment to all its professors.
hope religious mind
A religious hope does not only bear up the mind under her sufferings but makes her rejoice in them.
fables instruction severity
Fables take off from the severity of instruction, and enforce it at the same time that they conceal it.
flattery persons listeners
The most skillful flattery is to let a person talk on, and be a listener.
education wise art
A statue lies hid in a block of marble, and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter and removes the rubbish. The figure is in the stone; the sculptor only finds it. What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul. The philosopher, the saint, or the hero,--the wise, the good, or the great man,--very often lies hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred, and have brought to light.
dream mistake believe
I believe that everyone, some time or other, dreams that he is reading papers, books, or letters; in which case the invention prompts so readily that the mind is imposed upon, and mistakes its own suggestions for the composition of another.
sex light evil
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.
lying doe enthusiasm
Devotion, when it does not lie under the check of reason, is apt to degenerate into enthusiasm.
men connections odd
It is odd to consider the connection between despotism and barbarity, and how the making one person more than man makes the rest less.
humanity pity incitement
Dependence is a perpetual call upon humanity, and a greater incitement to tenderness and pity than any other motive whatever.
distance selfish eye
Cunning has only private selfish aims, and sticks at nothing which may make them succeed. Discretion has large and extended views, and, like a well-formed eye, commands a whole horizon; cunning is a kind of shortsightedness, that discovers the minutest objects which are near at hand, but is not able to discern things at a distance.
men want violence
The most exquisite words and finest strokes of an author are those which very often appear the most doubtful and exceptionable to a man who wants a relish for polite learning; and they are those which a sour undistinguishing critic generally attacks with the greatest violence.
hands suffering faults
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.