Richard Steele Quotes
An Irish writer and politician, remembered, along with his friend, Joseph Addison, as co-founder of The Spectator magazine.
(1672 - 1729)
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A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living.
[Age]
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A little in drink, but at all times your faithful husband.
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A man advanced in years, who thinks fit to look back upon his former life, and call that only life which was passed with satisfaction and enjoyment, will find himself very young, if not in his infancy.
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A man cannot be cheerful and good-natured unless he is also honest; which is not to be said of sadness.
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A man cannot have an idea of perfection in another, which he was never sensible of in himself.
[Perfection]
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A man endowed with great perfections, without good-breeding, is like one who has his pockets full of gold, but always wants change for his ordinary occasions.
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A man that is temperate, generous, valiant, chaste, faithful, and honest, may, at the same time, have wit, humour, mirth, good breeding, and gallantry. While he exerts these latter qualities, twenty occasions might be invented to show he is master of the other noble virtues.
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A man's appearance falls within the censure of every one that sees him; his parts and learning very few are judges of.
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A modest person seldom fails to gain the goodwill of those he converses with, because nobody envies a man who does not appear to be pleased with himself.
[Modesty]
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A true and genuine impudence is ever the effect of ignorance, without the least sense of it.
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A wag is in the last order even of pretenders to wit and humor. - Generally he has his mind prepared to receive some occasion of merriment, but is of himself too empty to draw any out of his own thoughts, and therefore he laughs at the next thing he meets, not because it is ridiculous, but because he is under the necessity of laughing.
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A Woman is naturally more helpless than the other Sex; and a Man of Honour and Sense should have this in his View in all Manner of Commerce with her.
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A woman seldom writes her mind but in her postscript.
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All a woman has to do in this world is contained within the duties of a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother.
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All that nature has prescribed must be good; and as death is natural to us, it is absurdity to fear it. Fear loses its purpose when we are sure it cannot preserve us, and we should draw resolution to meet it from the impossibility to escape it.
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Allow no man to be so free with you as to praise you to your face. Your vanity by this means will want its food. At the same time your passion for esteem will be more fully gratified; men will praise you in their actions: where you now receive one compliment, you will then receive twenty civilities.
[Flattery]
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Among all the diseases of the mind, there is not one more epidemical or more pernicious than the love of flattery.
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An inquisitive man is a creature naturally very vacant of thought itself, and therefore forced to apply to foreign assistance.
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As beauty of body, with an agreeable carriage, pleases the eye, and that pleasure consists in that we observe all the parts with a certain elegance are proportioned to each other; so does decency of behavior which appears in our lives obtain the approbation of all with whom we converse, from the order, consistency, and moderation of our words and actions.
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As ceremony is the invention of wise men to keep fools at a distance, so good breeding is an expedient to make fools and wise men equal.
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