Top 294 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Joubert - Page 2
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French writer Joseph Joubert.
Last updated on April 20, 2025.
In order to be happy, think of the ills you have been spared.
If you are poor, distinguish yourself by your virtues; if rich, by your good deeds.
Imitate time; it destroys everything slowly; it undermines, it wears away, it detaches, it does not wrench.
The mind is the atmosphere of the soul.
I resemble the poplar,--that tree which, even when old, still looks young.
Everything that is exact is short.
Living requires but little life; doing requires much.
When you give, give with joy and smiling.
Good impulses are naught, unless they become good actions.
Before you use a fancy word, make room for it.
Of the two, I prefer those who render vice lovable to those who degrade virtue.
Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas.
Children must be rendered reasonable, but not reasoners. The first thing to teach them is that it is reasonable for them to obey, and unreasonable for them to dispute.
We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.
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.
We live in an age in which superfluous ideas abound and essential ideas are lacking.
The sound of the drum drives out thought; for that very reason it is the most military of instruments.
We use up in the passions the stuff that was given us for happiness.
You want to talk to someone; first open your ears.
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.
Genius begins beautiful works, but only labor finishes them.
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!
Old age was naturally more honored in times when people could not know much more than what they had seen.
There is an admiration which is the daughter of knowledge.
Poetry is to be found nowhere unless we carry it within us.
When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come.
When we love, it is the heart that judges.
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.
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.
One should choose for a wife only such a woman as he would choose for a friend, were she a man.
Luckily, I never feel at one time more than half my pains.
Truth consists of having the same idea about something that God has.
Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.
Thoughts there are, that need no embodying, no form, no expression. It is enough to hint at them vaguely; a word, and they are heard and seen.
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.
Strength is natural, but grace is the growth of habit. This charming quality requires practice if it is to become lasting.
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.
A false mind is false in everything, just as a cross eye always looks askant. But one may err once, nay, a hundred times, without being double-minded. There can never be mental duplicity where there is sincerity.
The early and the latter part of human life are the best, or, at least, the most worthy of respect; the one as the age of innocence, the other of reason.
What can one possibly introduce into a mind that is already full, and full of itself?
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.
The paper is patient, but the reader is not.
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.
The essence of life consists in thinking, and being conscious of one's soul.
We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.
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.
There are some heads which have no windows, and the day can never strike from above; nothing enters from heavenard.
How many weak shoulders have craved heavy burdens!
TIME and truth are friends, though there are many moments hostile to truth.
How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound.
Attention is like a narrow mouthed vessel; pour into it what you have to say cautiously, and, as it were, drop by drop.
Life is a country that the old have seen, and lived in. Those who have to travel through it can only learn from them.
Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features
The evening of life brings with it its lamps.
To be capable of respect is almost as rare as to be worthy of it.
God has commanded Time to console the afflicted.
Virtue is the health of the soul.
Beautiful works do not intoxicate, but they enchant.
Reason is a bee, and exists only on what it makes; his usefulness takes the place of beauty.
You have to be like the pebble in the stream, keeping the grain and rolling along without being dissolved or dissolving anything else.
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