Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison’s line flatters the reader and indicts him in the same breath: power, he suggests, isn’t just a political instrument but a private pleasure. “Gratifying” makes dominion sound almost harmless, like a tasteful indulgence. That’s the trick. He’s smuggling a hard claim about human nature through the polite diction of an early-18th-century gentleman essayist, a voice built to be trusted by the rising literate public.

The intent is less to cheer conquest than to diagnose appetite. By locating the craving in “the mind of man,” Addison frames dominion as psychological before it is governmental. Power isn’t merely something rulers possess; it’s something ordinary people fantasize about and rehearse in miniature: in households, workplaces, social rank, even in the small satisfactions of being obeyed. The word “nothing” is a rhetorical dare, a totalizing absolutism that forces readers to test their own motives against it.

Context matters. Addison writes in a Britain increasingly defined by party politics, empire, commerce, and an expanding public sphere where reputation and influence could be manufactured, traded, and lost. His essays often teach manners and morals for this new world. Here, the subtext is a warning aimed at a society learning new forms of leverage: if dominion is the mind’s most reliable thrill, then virtue will always be competing with a stronger drug. The sentence works because it sounds like calm observation while quietly explaining why people keep choosing hierarchy even when they claim to hate it.