Joseph Joubert

Young authors give their brains much exercise and little food.

Drawing is speaking to the eye talking is painting to the ear.

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

Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.

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.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

Questions show the minds range and answers its subtlety.

Politeness is the flower of humanity.

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

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

The passions of the young are vices in the old.

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

The evening of a well spent life brings its lamps with it.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Kindness is loving people more than they deserve

To teach is to learn twice over.

The talkative man speaks from his mouth the eloquent man speaks from his heart.

All luxury corrupts either the morals or the taste.

Grief Happiness is to feel that ones soul is good there is no other in truth and this kind of happiness may exist even in sorrow so that there are griefs perfable to every joy and such as would be preferred by all those who have felt them.

The paper is patient, but the reader is not.

Be charitable and indulge to everyone, but thyself.

To teach is to learn twice.

Attention is like a narrow mouthed vessel; pour into it what you have to say cautiously, and, as it were, drop by drop.

The sound of the drum drives out thought for that very reason it is the most military of instruments.

God has commanded Time to console the unhappy

Politeness smooths wrinkles.

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

Space is to place as eternity is to time.

Monuments are the grappling-irons that bind one generation to another.

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

One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.

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.

One can with dignity be wife and widow but once.

Innocence is always unsuspicious.

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.

Agriculture engenders good sense and good sense of an excellent kind.

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

Never cut what you can untie.

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

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

Ask the young. They know everything.

The punishment of those who have loved women too much is to love them always.

When one has too great a dread of what is impending one feels some relief when the trouble has come.

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

Necessity may render a doubtful act innocent, but it cannot make it praiseworthy.

Be saving, but not at the cost of all liberality. Have the soul of a king and the hand of a wise economist.

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

Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind.

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

Genius begins great works labor alone finishes them.

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

Children need models rather than critics.

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.

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

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

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

Misery is almost always the result of thinking.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

Genius begins with great works; labor alone finishes them.

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

Justice is the truth in action.

Slander is the solace of malignity.

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.

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

In temperance there is ever cleanliness and elegance.

Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.

Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings.

Genuinely good remarks surprise their author as well as his audience.

Space is the stature of God.

Moderation consists in being moved as angels are moved.

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

Our ideals, like pictures, are made from lights and shadows.

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

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

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

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

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

Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people.

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