Joseph Joubert Quotes

It is always our inabilities that vex us.

The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk.

It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas.

All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.

Justice is the right of the weakest.

What is true by lamplight is not always true by sunlight.

When my friends lack an eye, I look at them in profile.

Innocence is always unsuspicious.

Mediocrity is excellence in the eyes of the mediocre.

I quit Paris unwillingly, because I must part from my friends; and I quit the country unwillingly, because I must part from myself.

We know God easily, if we do not constrain ourselves to define him.

Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.

When you give, give with joy and smiling.

Questions show the mind's range, and answers its subtlety.

Luckily, I never feel at one time more than half my pains.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Lenity is a part of justice; but she must not speak too loud for fear of waking justice.

One man finds in religion his literature and his science, another finds in it his joy and his duty.

Know that morality is a curb, not a spur.

There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work.

Never be sad for what is over, just be glad it was once yours. Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.

Old age deprives the intelligent man only of qualities useless to wisdom.

Men have torn up the roads which led to Heaven, and which all the world followed; now we have to make our own ladders.

In really good acting we should be able to believe that what we hear and see is of our own imagining; it should seem to be to us as a charming dream.

The talkative man speaks from his mouth, the eloquent man speaks from his heart.

Fully to understand a grand and beautiful thought requires, perhaps, as much time as to conceive it.