Success Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison is doing something sly here: he’s not warning against hope so much as accusing a certain kind of hoping of being a form of self-sabotage dressed up as virtue. The line turns on a brutal little mechanism: “hope” sounds noble, but when it’s aimed at what we’re “not likely to possess,” it becomes an engine for wasted cognition - “act and think in vain” - and, worse, a distortion field. Life is already fleeting (“dream and shadow”), a familiar classical and Christian metaphor; Addison’s jab is that unrealistic expectation doesn’t comfort us against that fragility, it amplifies it. You don’t just lose the prize. You lose your grip on the world you actually have.

The intent is moral hygiene, the kind that defined early 18th-century essay culture. Addison, the Spectator-era architect of middle-class manners and mental discipline, writes for readers navigating new appetites: commerce, status anxiety, upward mobility, romantic fantasy. In that world, longing is easily marketed, and disappointment becomes a lifestyle. His diction is calibrated to sound reasonable rather than ascetic: “not likely” leaves room for ambition, but demands probabilistic humility.

Subtext: imagination is powerful, but it’s politically and psychologically expensive. When desire outruns reality, it makes you easier to manage - by your own vanity, by social comparison, by the promise of future fulfillment always just out of reach. Addison’s restraint is less about killing dreams than about refusing to let dreams do the living for you.