Quotes by Joseph Addison

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

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

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.

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

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

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.

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.

A woman seldom asks advice before she has bought her wedding clothes.

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

“We all of us complain of the shortness of time, saith Seneca, and yet have much more than we know what to do with. Our lives, says he, are spent either in doing nothing at all, or in doing nothing to the purpose, or in doing nothing that we ought to do: we are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would no end of them.- On the Right Use of Time”