Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison’s line luxuriates in misery with the controlled abandon of a man who knows despair is both a feeling and a performance. “I will indulge” is the tell: sorrow isn’t simply suffered, it’s chosen, savored, almost consumed like a vice. That verb makes grief sound less like weather and more like agency, which is precisely why it lands. It frames despair as an act of will, a temporary sovereignty in a world where polite reason is supposed to rule.

The sentence then escalates in a deliberately theatrical register: “pangs” (tight, bodily pain) beside “fury” (public, combustible rage). It’s not just sadness; it’s a full spectrum meltdown, staged with rhetorical symmetry. Addison, a master of the period’s moral-and-social prose, knew how to write emotion without letting it break the furniture. Even as he “gives way,” the phrasing is disciplined, balanced, almost classical. The subtext is that surrender can be curated.

Context matters: early 18th-century English letters were obsessed with regulating the passions. The Spectator ethos prized moderation, sociability, the self as a governable project. Against that backdrop, this vow to let go reads less like confession than like sanctioned rebellion - a momentary holiday from virtue. There’s also a faint whiff of tragedy’s prestige here: despair becomes something noble to inhabit, not merely a symptom to fix. Addison is testing how far a civilized voice can lean into darkness without losing its manners, and the tension between composure and collapse is the engine of the line.