Joseph Joubert Quotes

Politeness is the flower of humanity.

When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages; but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion.

Chance generally favors the prudent.

A thought is a thing as real as a cannonball.

There are some heads which have no windows, and the day can never strike from above; nothing enters from heavenard.

Every legitimate authority should respect its extent and its limits.

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.

There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.

The soul that is the abode of chastity acquires an energy which enables her to surmount with ease the obstacles that lie along the path of duty.

The voice is a human sound which nothing inanimate can perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an insinuating property which writing lacks. It is not merely so much air, but air modulated and impregnated with life.

The God of metaphysics is but an idea. But the God of religion, the Maker of heaven and earth, the sovereign Judge of actions and thoughts, is a power.

Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas.

One can with dignity be wife and widow but once.

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.

The mind is the atmosphere of the soul.

The soul paints itself in our machines.

No one is mediocre who has good sense and good sentiments.

All disputation makes the mind deaf; and when people are deaf, I am dumb.

The passions should be purged; all may become innocent if they are well directed and moderated. Even hatred maybe a commendable feeling when it is caused by a lively love of good. Whatever makes the passions pure, makes them stronger, more durable, and more enjoyable.

The beautiful invariably possesses a visible and a hidden beauty; and it is certain that no style is so beautiful as that which presents to the attentive reader a half-hidden meaning.

I love prudence very little, if it is not moral.

Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind.

Ask the young. They know everything.

We disjoint the mind like the body.

Sexes. One has the look of a wound, the other of something skinned.

I would fain coin wisdom,—mould it, I mean, into maxims, proverbs, sentences, that can easily be retained and transmitted. Would that I could denounce and banish from the language of men—as base money—the words by which they cheat and are cheated!

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

Let your cry be for free souls rather than for freedom. Moral liberty is the only important liberty.

A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.

The dregs may stir themselves as they please; they fall back to the bottom by their own coarseness.

To the liberal ideas of the age must be opposed the moral ideas of all ages.

Monuments are the grappling-irons that bind one generation to another.

Never cut what you can untie.

What can one possibly introduce into a mind that is already full, and full of itself?

Today there are no more irreconcilable enmities, because there are no more disinterested emotions: that's a good thing born from a bad thing.

The essence of life consists in thinking, and being conscious of one's soul.

Forms of government become established of themselves. They shape themselves, they are not created. We may give them strength and consistency, but we cannot call them into being. Let us rest assured that the form of government can never be a matter of choice: it is almost always a matter of necessity.

Close your eyes and you will see.

I do not call reason that brutal reason which crushes with its weight what is holy and sacred, that malignant reason which delights in the errors it succeeds in discovering, that unfeeling and scornful reason which insults credulity.

A temperate style is alone classical.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

To teach is to learn twice.

Whence? wither? why? how? - these questions cover all philosophy.

Criticism even should not be without its charms. When quite devoid of all amenities, it is no longer literary.

Grace is in garments, in movements, in manners; beauty in the nude, and in forms. This is true of bodies; but when we speak of feelings, beauty is in their spirituality, and grace in their moderation.

Abuse of words is the foundation of ideology.

Reason is a bee, and exists only on what it makes; his usefulness takes the place of beauty.

Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-six notes