Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body. As by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated: by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed.
JOSEPH ADDISONAdmiration is a very short lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it still be fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.
More Joseph Addison Quotes
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There is noting truly valuable which can be purchased without pains and labor. The gods have set a price upon every real and noble pleasure.
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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.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
Nature is full of wonders; every atom is a standing miracle, and endowed with such qualities, as could not be impressed on it by a power and wisdom less than infinite.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
Look what a little vain dust we are!
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Charity is a virtue of the heart, and not of the hands.
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According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood.
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The greatest sweetener of human life is friendship.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
I am wonderfully pleased when I meet with any passage in an old Greek or Latin author, that is not blown upon, and which I have never met with in any quotation.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
When a woman comes to her class, she does not employ her time in making herself look more advantageously what she really is, but endeavours to be as much another creature as she possibly can.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
it would generally be found that he had suffered more from the apprehension of such evils as never happened to him than from those evils which had really befallen him.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
One may know a man that never conversed in the world, by his excess of good-breeding.
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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.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
Encourage innocent amusement.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
This not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
Were I to prescribe a rule for drinking, it should be formed upon a saying quoted by Sir William Temple: the first glass for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the fourth for mine enemies.
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Love is a second life; it grows into the soul, warms every vein, and beats in every pulse.
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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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On you, my lord, with anxious fear I wait, and from your judgment must expect my fate.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas.
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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.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
It is not the business of virtue to extirpate the affections of the mind, but to regulate them.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
There is nothing more requisite in business than despatch.
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One of the most important but one of the most difficult things for a powerful mind is to be its own master.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato’s description of the Supreme Being,–that truth is His body and light His shadow.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.
JOSEPH ADDISON -
When men are easy in their circumstances, they are naturally enemies to innovations.
JOSEPH ADDISON