Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison’s line lands like a compliment to prudence, then quietly turns into a warning label. “Always expect the most” sounds like praise for careful, responsible people, but the punch is in the narrowing: “who keep their own accounts.” He’s not celebrating generosity in the abstract; he’s identifying the kind of person who can afford to be generous without making a show of it - and who won’t be reckless with other people’s money while doing it.

The intent is partly practical, partly moral. In Addison’s early-18th-century Britain, “accounts” weren’t just bookkeeping; they were a badge of character in a commercial society newly obsessed with credit, trust, and reputation. Charity and public virtue were becoming social currencies, and Addison is skeptical of the donors who perform benevolence while outsourcing the cost, whether to creditors, patrons, or the poor themselves. The prudent person, by contrast, has confronted the arithmetic. Their donation is not an impulse or a bid for applause; it’s a deliberate allocation.

The subtext takes aim at a familiar type: the spendthrift philanthropist, generous on principle and disastrous in practice, who gives loudly because he hasn’t counted. Addison implies that real giving is tethered to responsibility - not because charity should be miserly, but because it should be accountable. The line flatters the self-governed reader and nudges them toward a specific civic ideal: private discipline as the foundation for public virtue. In that sense, it’s less about money than about credibility. The best donors, he suggests, aren’t saints. They’re adults.