Joseph Joubert

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.

Never cut what you can untie.

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

We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.

Innocence is always unsuspicious.

Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable of.

The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.

When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.

A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.

Misery is almost always the result of thinking.

Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman.

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.

It is easy to understand God as long as you don’t try to explain him.

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love the truth.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

All are born to observe order, but few are born to establish it.

Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings.

The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.

The passions of the young are vices in the old.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine – but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Justice is the truth in action.

Children need models rather than critics.

God is the place where I do not remember the rest.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

Ask the young. They know everything.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Grace is in garments, in movements, in manners; beauty in the nude, and in forms. This is true of bodies; but when we speak of feelings, beauty is in their spirituality, and grace in their moderation.

To teach is to learn twice.

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

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

Politeness is the flower of humanity.

Be charitable and indulge to everyone, but thyself.

One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.

Space is the stature of God.

Space is to place as eternity is to time.

Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.

Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.