Joseph Addison
A money-lender--he serves you in the present tense; he lends you in the conditional mood; keeps you in the conjunctive; and ruins you in the future.Collection: Ruins
Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world, and ignorance of mankind.Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Inspirational
A vast space naturally raises in my thoughts the idea of an Almighty Being.Collection: Ideas
There is no greater sign of a bad cause, than when the patrons of it are reduced to the necessity of making use of the most wicked artifices to support it.Collection: Support
All of heaven we have below.Collection: Music
Others proclaim the infirmities of a great man with satisfaction and complacence, if they discover none of the like in themselves.Collection: Men
Among the writers of antiquity there are none who instruct us more openly in the manners of their respective times in which they lived than those who have employed themselves in satire, under whatever dress it may appear.Collection: Dresses
It is odd to consider the connection between despotism and barbarity, and how the making one person more than man makes the rest less.Collection: Men
Music is the only sensual gratification which mankind may indulge in to excess without injury to their moral or religious feelings.Collection: Music
A virtuous mind in a fair body is indeed a fine picture in a good light, and therefore it is no wonder that it makes the beautiful sex all over charms.Collection: Beautiful
We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of art.Collection: Art
Should a writer single out and point his raillery at particular persons, or satirize the miserable, he might be sure of pleasing a great part of his readers, but must be a very ill man if he could please himself.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Music
One hope no sooner dies in us but another rises up in its stead. We are apt to fancy that we shall be happy and satisfied if we possess ourselves of such and such particular enjoyments; but either by reason of their emptiness, or the natural inquietude of the mind, we have no sooner gained one point, but we extend our hopes to another. We still find new inviting scenes and landscapes lying behind those which at a distance terminated our view.Collection: Hope
Virgil has very finely touched upon the female passion for dress and shows, in the character of Camilla; who though she seems to have shaken off all the other weaknesses of her sex, is still described as a woman in this particular.Collection: Sex
It is observed by Cicero, that men of the greatest and most shining parts are most actuated by ambition.Collection: Ambition
Waning moons their settled periods keep, to swell the billows and ferment the deep.Collection: Moon
Our Grub-street biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers on purpose to make a penny of him.Collection: Men
It is certain that there is no other passion which does produce such contrary effects in so great a degree. But this may be said for love, that if you strike it out of the soul, life would be insipid, and our being but half animated.Collection: Love
Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant.Collection: Understanding
When I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, with other innumerable distempers lying in ambuscade among the dishes. Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every animal but man keeps to one dish. Herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of a third. Man falls upon everything that comes in his way; not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or a mushroom can escape him.Collection: Lying
Eternity! thou pleasing, dreadful thought.Collection: Time
Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part of life.Collection: Mean
The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas.Collection: Wise
Most of the trades, professions, and ways of living among mankind, take their original either from the love of the pleasure, or the fear of want. The former, when it becomes too violent, degenerates into luxury, and the latter into avarice.Collection: Work
Wit is the fetching of congruity out of incongruity.Collection: Wit
A person may be qualified to do greater good to mankind and become more beneficial to the world, by morality without faith than by faith without morality.Collection: World
The friendships of the world are oft confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasures.Collection: Friendship
To this end, nothing is to be more carefully consulted than plainness. In a lady's attire this is the single excellence; for to be what some people call fine, is the same vice, in that case, as to be florid is in writing or speaking.Collection: Writing
Cleanliness may be defined to be the emblem of purity of mind.Collection: Mind
Those who were skillful in Anatomy among the Ancients, concluded from the outward and inward Make of an Human Body, that it was the Work of a Being transcendently Wise and Powerful. As the World grew more enlightened in this Art, their Discoveries gave them fresh Opportunities of admiring the Conduct of Providence in the Formation of an Human Body.Collection: God
Love, anger, pride and avarice all visibly move in those little orbs.Collection: Moving
The end of a man's life is often compared to the winding up of a well written play, where the principal persons still act in character, whatever the fate in which they undergo.Collection: Character
Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.Collection: Sight
There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion.Collection: Men
Quick sensitivity is inseperable from a ready understanding.Collection: Understanding
The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease.Collection: Men
He only is a great man who can neglect the applause of the multitude and enjoy himself independent of its favor.Collection: Independent
Riches are apt to betray a man into arrogance.Collection: Pride
Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly.Collection: Nature
It is the duty of all who make philosophy the entertainment of their lives, to turn their thoughts to practical schemes for the good of society, and not pass away their time in fruitless searches, which tend rather to the ostentation of knowledge than the service of life.Collection: Philosophy
Our delight in any particular study, art, or science rises and improves in proportion to the application which we bestow upon it. Thus, what was at first an exercise becomes at length an entertainment.Collection: Art
One would fancy that the zealots in atheism would be exempt from the single fault which seems to grow out of the imprudent fervor of religion. But so it is, that irreligion is propagated with as much fierceness and contention, wrath and indignation, as if the safety of mankind depended upon it.Collection: Wrath
The care of our national commerce redounds more to the riches and prosperity of the public than any other act of government.Collection: Government