Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison’s charm here is that he pretends to misplace the exact wording while delivering the moral with surgical clarity. The “I cannot recollect the words” is a genteel feint: a way to sound modest, conversational, almost accidental, even as he smuggles in a clean accounting system for virtue. That’s classic early-18th-century essayist rhetoric - moral instruction disguised as coffeehouse talk.

The epitaph’s ledger-like triad (“spent,” “possessed,” “gave away”) borrows the language of commerce and inheritance, then flips its conclusions. Spending, usually the sign of agency and pleasure, becomes pure vanishing. Possession, usually security, is reduced to a temporary custodianship: it “is left to others” whether you like it or not. Only giving away - the act that looks like loss on paper - “remains with me,” because it converts money into something the market can’t repossess: reputation, conscience, spiritual credit, social memory.

The subtext is pointedly political as well as personal. Addison is writing in a culture where wealth is consolidating, commerce is morally suspect in some quarters, and “charity” is both Christian duty and a social technology for stabilizing inequality without challenging it. The epitaph offers an elegant bargain to the affluent: you can keep your comforts, but secure your legacy by redistributing a portion in a way that flatters your soul and your name.

It works because it doesn’t scold. It seduces with arithmetic - and with the quiet terror behind it: everything you “possess” is already half-gone.