A Quote by Joseph Joubert

Maxims are to the intellect what laws are to actions; they do not enlighten, but they guide and direct, and, although themselves blind, are protective. — © Joseph Joubert
Maxims are to the intellect what laws are to actions; they do not enlighten, but they guide and direct, and, although themselves blind, are protective.
Allow the emptiness inherent within actions and experiences to guide and shape your choices. Let your actions direct you, the actor, not the other way around.
Human behaviour reveals uniformities which constitute natural laws. If these uniformities did not exist, then there would be neither social science nor political economy, and even the study of history would largely be useless. In effect, if the future actions of men having nothing in common with their past actions, our knowledge of them, although possibly satisfying our curiosity by way of an interesting story, would be entirely useless to us as a guide in life.
Take for example providing a guide dog for a blind person. That's a good thing to do, right? All right. It is a good thing to do. But you have to think what else you could do with the resources. It costs about $40,000 to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person. It costs somewhere between 20 and $50 to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma. So you do the sums, and you could provide one guide dog for one blind American or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness.
It seems the whole works of humankind are backwards. Most are trying to convince, instruct, and purify everyone else - without first purifying themselves. To enlighten others we have to enlighten ourselves.
We don't always possess faith in the sense of having a clear embodiment of something to hang on to. The relationship between the intellect and faith is a very curious one. Sometimes the intellect can point us to faith, sometimes the intellect can stand in the way of faith. Sometimes, as St John of the Cross points out, we have to darken or blind the intellect in order to have faith.
The revelation is that when you lift the curtain, history is decided by a very small group of people, and their own interests guide their actions, not necessarily the laws or principles we think our country rides on.
I have my golden retriever now, Pontiac. He's a career-change guide dog from Guide Dogs for the Blind.
To have a developed intellect is always helpful if one can enlighten it from above and turn it to a divine use.
A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.
Let us have compassion upon each other, and let the strong tenderly nurse the weak into strength, and let those who can see guide the blind until they can see the way for themselves.
The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves, under whatsoever form it be of government; the liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country.
People's conceptions about themselves and the nature of things are developed and verified through four different processes: direct experience of the effects produced by their actions, vicarious experience of the effects produced by somebody else's actions, judgments voiced by others, and derivation of further knowledge from what they already know by using rules of inference
President Obama's executive actions give work permits and federal entitlement benefits to people illegally in America - in direct violation of the laws passed by Congress. This undermines the entire constitutional system of government.
What's the condition of America like, spiritually, tonight? Zero. Why? Because we've got blind men coming out of seminaries. Men there don't teach them; they don't hear a word about Hell. They're blind themselves, and as blind men, they lead the blind and they go to Hell.
Although actions speak louder than words, I believe it is our intentions that reveal our soul. Refrain from judging others based solely on their words and actions, and seek to know their deepest intentions so that you can know who they truly aspire to be, and support them in becoming the best version of themselves.
The region belonging to the pure intellect is straitened: the imagination labours to extend its territories, to give it room. She sweeps across the boarders, searching out new lands into which she may guide her plodding brother. The imagination is the light which redeems from the darkness for the eyes of the understanding. Novalis says, 'The imagination is the stuff of the intellect' -affords, that is, the material upon which the intellect works.
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