Joseph Addison Quotes

Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

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

Husband a lie, and trump it up in some extraordinary emergency.

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. He has a heart capable of mirth, and naturally disposed to it.

Our disputants put me in mind of the scuttlefish that, when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens the water about him till he becomes invisible.

Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it be still fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.

Young men soon give, and soon forget, affronts; Old age is slow in both.

Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.

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