Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Admiration, Addison suggests, is less a virtue than a fever: intense, flattering, and predictably brief. The line works because it punctures a comforting story we like to tell about ourselves-that respect is earned and then steadily held. Instead, Addison frames admiration as an early-stage emotion, dependent on distance and partial information. It thrives on silhouette. Once the object comes into focus, the spell breaks.

The phrasing is doing quiet work. "Passion" carries heat and impulse, not judgment; admiration isn’t reasoned appraisal, it’s a rush. "Immediately decays" borrows the language of rot and entropy, implying that familiarity doesn’t merely soften admiration-it actively consumes it. Addison isn’t warning that people disappoint; he’s saying our attention is structurally incapable of sustaining wonder once novelty is gone. The problem is in the admirer as much as the admired.

In Addison’s early-18th-century world-the coffeehouse public sphere, the rise of periodical culture, a new churn of reputations-this is also media critique avant la lettre. Public esteem becomes a commodity: minted quickly, spent quickly, devalued by over-circulation. The more you see of a writer, a politician, a court figure, the more their edges blur into ordinary texture.

The subtext has a moral sting. If admiration decays on contact, then celebrity is a trap and idealization a kind of laziness. Real esteem would have to survive proximity, contradiction, and the unglamorous rhythms of the everyday-the very things admiration prefers not to know.