Joseph Joubert Quotes

Strength is not energy; some authors have more muscles than talent.

Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people.

In the interchange of thought use no coin but gold and silver.

When a nation gives birth to a man who is able to produce a great thought, another is born who is able to understand and admire it.

Our life is woven wind.

We should make ourselves loved, for men are only just towards those whom they love.

The Bible is to religion what the Iliad is to poetry

Truth consists of having the same idea about something that God has.

To reason, to argue. It is to walk with crutches in search of the truth. We come to it with a leap.

When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.

Everything that is exact is short.

Old age takes from the man of intellect no qualities save those that are useless to wisdom.

We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live.

It would be next to impossible to discover a handsome woman who was not also a vain woman.

How many weak shoulders have craved heavy burdens!

National literature begins with fables and ends with novels.

We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.

Liquid, flowing words are the choicest and the best, if language is regarded as music. But when it is considered as a picture, then there are rough words which are very telling, they make their mark.

Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings.

Fancy, an animal faculty, is very different from imagination, which is intellectual. The former is passive; but the latter is active and creative. Children, the weak minded, and the timid are full of fancy. Men and women of intellect, of great intellect, are alone possessed of great imagination.

Be charitable and indulge to everyone, but thyself.

How many people eat, drink, and get married; buy, sell, and build; make contracts and attend to their fortune; have friends and enemies, pleasures and pains, are born, grow up, live and die - but asleep!

The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth,--that is the secret of the fine arts.

Speech is but the incorporation of thought.

We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.

Our ideals, like pictures, are made from lights and shadows.

Haughty people seem to me to have, like the dwarfs, the stature of a child and the face of a man.

A maxim is the exact and noble expression of an important and indisputable truth. Good maxims are the germs of all excellence; when firmly fixed on the memory, they nourish the will.

One should choose for a wife only such a woman as he would choose for a friend, were she a man.

How many books there are whose reputation is made that would not obtain it were it now to make?

Good maxims are the germs of all excellence.

The evening of life brings with it its lamps.

There are some men who are witty when they are in a bad humor, and others only when they are sad.

Happy is the man who can do only one thing; in doing it, he fulfills his destiny.

He who cannot see the beautiful side is a bad painter, a bad friend, a bad lover; he cannot lift his mind and his heart so high as goodness.

Space is the stature of God.

The simple-hearted and sincere never do more than half deceive themselves.

When credulity comes from the heart it does no harm to the intellect.

The punishment of those who have loved women too much is to love them always.

Virtue is the health of the soul. It gives a flavor to the smallest leaves of life.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

Logic is to grammar what the sense of words is to their sound.

Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.

Grief - Happiness is to feel that one's soul is good; there is no other, in truth, and this kind of happiness may exist even in sorrow, so that there are griefs perfable to every joy, and such as would be preferred by all those who have felt them.

God multiplies intelligence, which communicates itself, like fire, ad infinitum. Light a thousand torches at one touch, the flame remains always the same.

Antiquity! I like its ruins better than its reconstructions.

Proverbs may be said to be the abridgment of wisdom.

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.