Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

Quotes

• True happiness... arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self.

• Friendship improves hapiness and reduces misery, by doubting our joys and dividing our grief.

• Our imagination loves to be filled with an object or to grasp at anything that is too big for it's capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them.

• The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.

• Nothing that isn't a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconsistency.

• Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.

• True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.

• Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.

• A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.

• If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother and hope your guardian genius.

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

• I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

• Sweet are the slumbers of the virtuous man.

• Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.

• 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.

• What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but, scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.

• There are many shining qualities on the mind of man; but none so useful as discretion. It is this which gives a value to all the rest, and sets them at work in their proper places, and turns them to the advantage of their possessor. Without it, learning is pedantry; wit, impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness; and the best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. Though a man has all other perfections and wants discretion, he will be of no great consequence in the world; but if he has this single talent in perfection, and but a common share of others, he may do what he pleases in his station of life.

• The friendships of the world are oft confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasures.

• 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; and thus it may be looked on as weakness in the composition of human nature. But if we consider the frequent reliefs we receive from it and how often it breaks the gloom which is apt to depress the mind and damp our spirits, with transient, unexpected gleams of joy, one would take care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life.

• From social intercourse are derived some of the highest enjoyments of life; where there is a free interchange of sentiments the mind acquires new ideas, and by frequent exercise of its powers, the understanding gains fresh vigor.