Joseph Addison Soul Quotations

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.

Love is a second life; it grows into the soul, warms every vein, and beats in every pulse.

Courage that grows from constitution very often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it, and when it is only a kind of instinct in the Soul breaks out on all occasions without judgment or discretion. That courage which proceeds from the sense of our duty, and from the fear of offending Him that made us, acts always in a uniform manner, and according to the dictates of right reason.

The soul, considered with its Creator, is like one of those mathematical lines that may draw nearer to another for all eternity without a possibility of touching it; and can there be a thought so transporting as to consider ourselves in these perpetual approaches to Him, who is not only the standard of perfection, but of happiness?

With what astonishment and veneration may we look into our own souls, where there are such hidden stores of virtue and knowledge, such inexhaustible sources of perfection. We know not yet what we shall be, nor will it ever enter into the heart to conceive the glory that will be always in reserve for it.

Whether dark presages of the night proceed from any latent power of the soul during her abstraction, or from any operation of subordinate spirits, has been a dispute.

T is the Divinity that stirs within us.

It is certain that there is no other passion which does produce such contrary effects in so great a degree. But this may be said for love, that if you strike it out of the soul, life would be insipid, and our being but half animated.

A soul exasperated in ills, falls out With everything, its friend, itself.

The moral virtues, without religion are but cold, lifeless, and insipid; it is only religion which opens the mind to great conceptions, fills it with the most sublime ideas, and warms the soul with more than sensual pleasures.

Laughter, while it lasts, slackens and unbraces the mind, weakens the faculties, and causes a kind of remissness and dissolution in all the powers of the soul.

Wine displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.

Fame is a good so wholly foreign to our natures that we have no faculty in the soul adapted to it, nor any organ in the body to relish it; an object of desire placed out of the possibility of fruition.

A solid and substantial greatness of soul looks down with neglect on the censures and applauses of the multitude.

A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves constant ease and serenity within us; and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can befall us from without.

The soul, secured in her existence, smiles At the drawn dagger, and defies its point.

Loveliest of women! heaven is in thy soul, Beauty and virtue shine forever round thee, Bright'ning each other! thou art all divine!

Yet then from all my grief, O Lord, Thy mercy set me free, Whilst in the confidence of pray'r My soul took hold on thee.

Great souls by instinct to each other turn, demand alliance, and in friendship burn.

I think I may define taste to be that faculty of the soul which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike.