Quotes from Joseph Addison

Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood.

Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.

Sweet are the slumbers of the virtuous man.

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.

The talent of turning men into ridicule, and exposing to laughter those one converses with, is the qualification of little ungenerous tempers.

Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honoris a private station.

If ridicule were employed to laugh men out of vice and folly, it might be of some use.

A man whose extraordinary reputation thus lifts him up to the notice and observation of mankind, draws a multitude of eyes upon him, that will narrowly inspect every part of him.

There is nothing in which men more deceive themselves than in what they call zeal.

O ye powers that search The heart of man, and weigh his inmost thoughts, If I have done amiss, impute it not! The best may err, but you are good.

Instability of temper ought to be checked when it disposes men to wander from one scheme to another: since such a fickleness cannot but be attended with fatal consequences.

Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible.

As Vivacity is the Gift of Women, Gravity is that of Men.

I have but nine-pence in ready money, but I can draw for a thousand pounds.

The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers, And heavily in clouds brings on the day, The great, the important day, big with the fate Of Cato and of Rome.

All well-regulated families set apart an hour every morning for tea and bread and butter

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul.

All of heaven we have below.

Music, when thus applied, raises noble hints in the mind of the hearer, and fills it with great conceptions. It strengthens devotion, and advances praise into rapture.

Music can noble hints impart, Engender fury, kindle love, With unsuspected eloquence can move, And manage all the man with secret art.

Music religious heat inspires, It wakes the soul, and lifts it high, And wings it with sublime desires, And fits it to bespeak the Deity.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Music, among those who were styled the chosen people, was a religious art.

Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly.