Joseph Addison Quotations | Page 5

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.

We see the pernicious effects of luxury in the ancient Romans, who immediately found themselves poor as soon as this vice got footing among them.

Blesses his stars and thinks it luxury.

Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.

We cannot be guilty of a greater act of uncharitableness, than to interpret the afflictions which befall our neighbors as punishments and judgments.

Music can noble hints impart, Engender fury, kindle love, With unsuspected eloquence can move, And manage all the man with secret art.

There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good-nature, or something which must bear its appearance and supply its place. For this reason mankind have been forced to invent a kind of artificial humanity, which is what we express by the word Good-Breeding.

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.

Charity is a virtue of the heart, and not of the hands.

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