Joseph Joubert quotes
Joseph Joubert (1754–1824): French moralist and essayist. The library holds 118 quotes by Joseph Joubert. The 60 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
Often about: life, faith, art, knowledge, money, kindness
The best-known Joseph Joubert quotes
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Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable.
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You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you.
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We should always keep a corner of our heads open and free, that we may make room for the opinions of our friends.
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Young authors give their brains much exercise and little food.
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Remorse is the punishment of crime; repentance its expiation. The former appertains to a tormented conscience; the latter to a soul changed for the better.
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Politeness is to goodness what words are to thoughts.
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Children have more need of models than of critics.
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It is force and right that determine everything in the world; force till right is ready.
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The human voice has an authority and an insinuating property which writing lacks.
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Be saving, but not at the cost of all liberality. Have the soul of a king and the hand of a wise economist.
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Gravity is but the rind of wisdom; but it is a preservative rind.
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He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet.
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Words become luminous when the finger of the poet touches them with his phosphorus.
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Maxims are to the intellect what laws are to actions; they do not enlighten, but they guide and direct.
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Truth takes the stamp of the souls it enters. It is rigorous and rough in arid souls, but tempers and softens itself in loving natures.
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Fully to understand a grand and beautiful thought requires, perhaps, as much time as to conceive it.
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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.
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Grace is in garments, in movements, and manners; beauty in the nude and in forms.
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There never was a literary age whose dominant taste was not sickly.
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Piety is not a religion, although it is the soul of all religions.
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How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound! The greatest part of abstract terms are shadows that hide a vacuum.
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Religion is the only metaphysic that the multitude can understand and adopt.
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In clothes clean and fresh there is a kind of youth with which age should surround itself.
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Old age was naturally more honoured in times when people could not know much more than they had seen.
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The dregs may stir themselves as they please; they fall back to the bottom by their own coarseness.
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History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.
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There was a time when the world acted upon books. Now books act upon the world.
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Order is to arrangement what the soul is to the body, and what mind is to matter.
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We live in an age in which superfluous ideas abound and essential ideas are lacking.
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All disputation makes the mind deaf, and when people are deaf I am dumb.
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When credulity comes from the heart it does no harm to the intellect.
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If you are poor, distinguish yourself by your virtues; if rich, by your good deeds.
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Eyes raised towards heaven are always beautiful, whatever they be.
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He who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.
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Illusion on a ground of truth is the secret of the fine arts.
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The morality of some people is in remnants—never enough to make a coat.
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It is with our thoughts as with flowers. Those whose expression is simple carry their seed with them; those that are double, by their richness and pomp charm the mind, but produce nothing.
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Imitate time. It destroys slowly. It undermines, wears, loosens, separates. It does not uproot.
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Our ideas, like pictures, are made out of lights and shadows.
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There are some men who are witty when they are in a bad humour, and others only when they are sad.
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There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work.
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Nothing is poetry which does not transport; the lyre is a winged instrument.
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If fortune wishes to make a man estimable, she gives him virtues; if she wishes to make him esteemed, she gives him success.
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The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.
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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.
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In literature to-day there are plenty good masons, but few good architects.
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We know God easily, provided we do not constrain ourselves to define him.
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Nothing does so much honour to a woman as her patience, and nothing does her so little as the patience of her husband.
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If fortune would make a man estimable, she gives him virtues; if she would have him esteemed, she gives him success.
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All the passions seek after whatever nourishes them. Fear loves the idea of danger.
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Reason is a bee, and exists only on what it makes; its usefulness takes the place of beauty.
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The form of government can never be a matter of choice; it is almost always a matter of necessity.
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Religion is neither a theology nor a theosophy, but a discipline, a law, a yoke, an indissoluble engagement.
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The lively phraseology of Montesquieu was the result of long meditation. His words, as light as wings, bear on them grave reflections.
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Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.
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Success makes men look larger, if reflection does not measure them.
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Piety is a kind of modesty. It makes us turn aside our thoughts, as modesty makes us cast down our eyes in the presence of whatever is forbidden.
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Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.
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In the interchange of thought use no coin but gold and silver.
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Religion is a fire which example keeps alive, and which goes out if not communicated.