Joseph Addison Quotes About Understanding

Quotes about: Understanding

• Quick sensitivity is inseperable from a ready understanding.

  Joseph Addison

  Understanding, Sensitivity, Ready

• From social intercourse are derived some of the highest enjoyments of life; where there is a free interchange of sentiments the mind acquires new ideas, and by frequent exercise of its powers, the understanding gains fresh vigor.

  Joseph Addison

  Life, Exercise, Ideas

• A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint, will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy. - Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant; accommodates itself to the meanest capacities; silences the loud and clamorous, and cringes over the most obstinate and inflexible. - Philip of Macedon was a man of most invincible reason this way. He refuted by it all the wisdom of Athens; confounded their statesmen; struck their orators dumb; and at length argued them out of all their liberties.

  Joseph Addison

  Wisdom, Philosophy, Men

• Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant.

  Joseph Addison

  Understanding, Doubt, Gold

  Joseph Addison (1868). “The Works of Joseph Addison: Including the Whole Contents of Bp. Hurd's Edition, with Letters and Other Pieces Not Found in Any Previous Collection; and Macaulay's Essay on His Life and Works”, p.563

• The ways of heaven are dark and intricate,
  Puzzled in mazes, and perplex'd with errors;
  Our understanding traces them in vain,
  Lost and bewilder'd in the fruitless search;
  Nor sees with how much art the windings run,
  Nor where the regular confusion ends.

  Joseph Addison

  Running, Art, Dark

  Joseph Addison (1868). “The Works of Joseph Addison”, p.481

• One would wonder to hear skeptical men disputing for the reason of animals, and telling us it is only our pride and prejudices that will not allow them the use of that faculty. Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation, or the continuance of his species. Animals in their generation are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass. Take a brute out of his instinct, and you find him wholly deprived of understanding.

  Joseph Addison

  Lying, Pride, Son

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steel (1858). “The Spectator”, p.169

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