Never cut what you can untie.
About Joseph Joubert
Joseph Joubertwas a French moralist and essayist, remembered today largely for his Pensees (Thoughts), which were published posthumously.
More quotes from Joseph Joubert
There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.
French moralist and essayist
Never cut what you can untie.
French moralist and essayist
The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk.
French moralist and essayist
We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.
French moralist and essayist
Innocence is always unsuspicious.
French moralist and essayist
Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable of.
French moralist and essayist
The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.
French moralist and essayist
When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.
French moralist and essayist
A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.
French moralist and essayist
Misery is almost always the result of thinking.
French moralist and essayist
Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman.
French moralist and essayist
Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
French moralist and essayist
It is easy to understand God as long as you don’t try to explain him.
French moralist and essayist
Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love the truth.
French moralist and essayist
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.
French moralist and essayist
All are born to observe order, but few are born to establish it.
French moralist and essayist
Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings.
French moralist and essayist
The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.
French moralist and essayist
The passions of the young are vices in the old.
French moralist and essayist
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.
French moralist and essayist
Justice is the truth in action.
French moralist and essayist
Children need models rather than critics.
French moralist and essayist
God is the place where I do not remember the rest.
French moralist and essayist
Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.
French moralist and essayist
Ask the young. They know everything.
French moralist and essayist
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
French moralist and essayist
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.
French moralist and essayist
To teach is to learn twice.
French moralist and essayist
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
French moralist and essayist
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
French moralist and essayist
Politeness is the flower of humanity.
French moralist and essayist
Be charitable and indulge to everyone, but thyself.
French moralist and essayist
One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.
French moralist and essayist
Space is the stature of God.
French moralist and essayist
Space is to place as eternity is to time.
French moralist and essayist
Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.
French moralist and essayist
The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.
French moralist and essayist
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
French moralist and essayist
Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.
French moralist and essayist
It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
French moralist and essayist
Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.
French moralist and essayist
He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
French moralist and essayist
Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.
French moralist and essayist
Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.
French moralist and essayist