Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison’s line is a polite-era dagger: a reminder that “business” doesn’t collapse because people lack intelligence, but because they lack urgency. “Despatch” (his spelling) isn’t just speed for its own sake; it’s the moral posture of acting while others are still polishing their reasons. In early 18th-century London, commerce and government were swelling into modern bureaucracy, with coffeehouses doubling as newsrooms, trading floors, and rumor mills. Delay wasn’t a quirky personal flaw, it was a systemic habit: committees, courtiers, clerks, and gentlemen for whom hesitation could be disguised as refinement.

The sentence works because it’s absolute and spare. “Nothing more requisite” reads like a maxim you’d stitch onto a ledger. Addison frames despatch as a requirement, not a virtue - closer to literacy than heroism. That subtle downgrade is the point: he’s not praising hustle culture; he’s stripping procrastination of its alibis. If despatch is requisite, then dithering isn’t thoughtful, it’s unprofessional.

There’s also a social subtext. Addison, a master of urbane instruction, often used tidy aphorisms to smuggle discipline into polite conversation. He’s speaking to a class that prized decorum and deliberation, and he’s telling them that the market doesn’t care about your elegance. The clock is an unforgiving auditor. In that sense, the quote is less a motivational poster than a critique of performative busyness: the kind that looks important precisely because nothing gets finished.