Joseph Joubert Quotes

All good verses are like impromptus made at leisure.

The breath of the mind is attention.

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

There are those to whom one must advise madness.

Think of the ills from which you are exempt.

It is an aspect of all happiness to suppose that we deserve it.

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

When we love, it is the heart that judges.

When you give, give with joy and smiling.

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

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

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.

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

We measure minds by their stature; it would be better to esteem them by their beauty.

Minds which never rest are subject to many digressions.

National literature begins with fables and ends with novels.

If fortune wishes to make a man estimable, she gives him virtues; if she wishes to make him esteemed, she gives him success.

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

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

Contempt for private wrongs was one of the features of ancient morals.

Justice is the right of the weakest.

To see the world is to judge the judges.

Our life is woven wind.

It is always our inabilities that vex us.

The essential thing is not that there be many truths in a work, but that no truth be abused.

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

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

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

Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself.

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

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

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

Speech is but the incorporation of thought.

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

A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is. To write well, one needs a natural felicity and an acquired difficulty.

The soul paints itself in our machines.

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

Man is born with the faculty of speech. Who gives it to him? He who gives the bird its song.

The evening of a well spent youth brings it's lamps with it.

One can with dignity be wife and widow but once.

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

Fate and necessity are unconquerable.

In the commerce of language use only coin of gold and silver.

Success serves men as a pedestal. It makes them seem greater when not measured by reflection.

We do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us.

Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

The Bible is to religion what the Iliad is to poetry

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

Heaven is for those who think of it.

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