Blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin

 Oh ! Portius, is there not some chosen curse,

Some hidden thunder in the store of heaven,

Red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man

Who owes his greatness to his country's ruin?

 

-- Joseph Addison 

Those great corrupters of Christianity, the Jesuits

 

 Those great corrupters of Christianity, and indeed of natural religion, the Jesuits.

-- Joseph Addison 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The folly of strong drink

 

 The giant, gorg'd with flesh, and wine, and blood,

Lay stretch'd at length, and snoring in his den,

Belching raw gobbets from his maw, o'ercharg'd 

With purple wine and cruddled gore confus'd.

 

-- Joseph Addison

 

Thrice I brought and gave it him, and thrice he drained it in his folly. . . . and reeling fell upon his back, and lay there with his thick neck bent aslant, and sleep, that conquers all, laid hold on him. And from his gullet came forth wine and bits of human flesh, and he vomited in his drunken sleep.

 

-- Homer, Odyssey 9.360, 370

 

Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. 

-- Proverbs 20:1

 

Time is an ocean

 

 

 I consider time as an immense ocean, into which many noble authors are entirely swallowed up, many very much shattered and damaged, some quite disjointed and broken into pieces.

 

-- Joseph Addison

This dread of nations, this almighty Rome

The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna

 The boasted ancestors of these great men,

Whose virtues you admire, were all such ruffians;

This dread of nations, this almighty Rome,

That comprehends in her wide empire's bounds

All under heaven, was founded on a rape.

-- Joseph Addison, Cato

Christianity is infested with legends

 

 There are in Rome two sets of antiquities, the christian and the heathen; the former, though of a fresher date, are so embroiled with fable and legend, that one receives but little satisfaction.

-- Joseph Addison

You shall know them by their shrugging

 There is a kind of sluggish resignation, as well as poorness and degeneracy of spirit, in a state of slavery.

-- Joseph Addison

Thus am I doubly arm'd

 

Thus am I doubly arm'd; my death and life,

My bane and antidote, are both before me:

This, in a moment, brings me to an end;

But that informs me I shall never die.

Too late to get smart

 

They take up a book in their declining years, and grow very hopeful scholars by that time they are threescore.

-- Joseph Addison

The most natural division of all offenses

The most natural division of all offenses, is into those of omission and those of commission.

-- Joseph Addison

Even sound money tells lies: "The golden age is back" (for about five minutes)

Western Caesar, AD 286-293

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whatever victories the several pretenders to the empire obtained over one another, they are recorded on coins without the least reflection.

-- Joseph Addison

Promising Renewed Greatness: Slogans from Two Insurgents :

The coins [he issued] include many literary allusions but none more so than in the cryptic … legend that appears on many of the silver coins:  RSR.  This was short for Redeunt Saturnia Regna, ‘The Golden Age is back’, from Virgil’s Fourth Ecologue. 

Care not for any man

It is folly to seek the approbation of any being, besides the supreme; because no other being can make a right judgment of us, and because we can procure no considerable advantage from the approbation of any other being.

-- Joseph Addison

The soft captivity of love

When love's well tim'd, 'tis not a fault to love;

The strong, the brave, the virtuous, and the wise,

Sink in the soft captivity together.

-- Joseph Addison

His prattling tongue

His tongue, his prattling tongue,

had chang'd him quite

To sooty blackness, from the purest white.

-- Joseph Addison

And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity ... it defileth the whole body ... it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.

-- James 3:6, 8 

But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. 

-- Matthew 5:37

Real justice cares nothing for family, friend, or fraternity

Justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is always therefore represented as blind.

-- Joseph Addison

Who among us anymore is high-souled enough actually to disdain the trappings of greatness?

Nothing, says Longinus, can be great, the contempt of which is great.

-- Joseph Addison

YOU must know, my dear friend, that it is with the sublime as in the common life of man. In life nothing can be considered great which it is held great to despise. For instance, riches, honours, distinctions, sovereignties, and all other things which possess in abundance the external trappings of the stage, will not seem, to a man of sense, to be supreme blessings, since the very contempt of them is reckoned good in no small degree, and in any case those who could have them, but are high-souled enough to disdain them, are more admired than those who have them.

-- Longinus, On the Sublime, tr. W. Rhys Roberts, VII, 1

Imprudent fervour is the fault common to both belief and unbelief

 

One would fancy that infidels would be exempt from that single fault, which seems to grow out of the imprudent fervours of religion; but so it is, that infidelity is propagated with as much fierceness and contention, as if the safety of mankind depended upon it.

-- Joseph Addison's Spectator

Memory shows humankind to be conservative by nature

 

 

 

 The memory is perpetually looking back, when we have nothing present to entertain us: it is like those repositories in animals that are filled with stores of food, on which they may ruminate, when their present pasture fails.

-- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)