Joseph Addison Quotes About Satire

Quotes about: Satire

• There is nothing that more betrays a base ungenerous spirit than the giving of secret stabs to a man's reputation. Lampoons and satires that are written with wit and spirit are like poisoned darts, which not only inflict a wound, but make it incurable.

  Joseph Addison

  Men, Giving, Gossip

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1826). “The Spectator: With Notes, and a General Index”, p.30

• A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and should make a due discrimination between those that are and those that are not the proper objects of it.

  Joseph Addison

  Discrimination, Satire, Should

• Among the writers of antiquity there are none who instruct us more openly in the manners of their respective times in which they lived than those who have employed themselves in satire, under whatever dress it may appear.

  Joseph Addison

  Dresses, May, Satire

• Simonides, a poet famous in his generation, is, I think, author of the oldest satire that is now extant, and, as some say, of the first that was ever written.

  Joseph Addison

  Thinking, Generations, Firsts

  Joseph Addison, Richard Steele (1854). “The Spectator”, p.178

• Should a writer single out and point his raillery at particular persons, or satirize the miserable, he might be sure of pleasing a great part of his readers, but must be a very ill man if he could please himself.

  Joseph Addison

  Men, Might, Miserable

• The world is so full of ill-nature that I have lampoons sent me by people who cannot spell, and satires composed by those who scarce know how to write.

  Joseph Addison

  Writing, People, World

  Sir Richard Steele, Alexander Chalmers, Joseph Addison (1806). “The Spectator”, p.93

• A jealous man is very quick in his application: he knows how to find a double edge in an invective, and to draw a satire on himself out of a panegyrick on another.

  Joseph Addison

  Jealous, Men, Envy

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1753). “The Beauties of the Spectators, Tatlers, and Guardians: Connected and Digested Under Alphabetical Heads”, p.199

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