Joseph Joubert

"Eyes raised towards Heaven are always beautiful, whatever they be."

"Good impulses are naught, unless they become good actions."

"All luxury corrupts either the morals or the taste."

"When I see young people such as those of our day, I think that Heaven wishes to destroy the world."

"To be capable of respect is, in these days, almost as rare as to be worthy of it."

"Le génie commence les beaux ouvrages, mais le travail seul les achève."

"To teach is to learn twice over."

"He who has no poetry in himself will find poetry in nothing."

"Thought forms in the soul the same way clouds form in the air."

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

"It is not facts, but rumors that cause emotions among the people. What is believed creates everything."

"Are you listening to the ones who keep quiet?"

"Someone said of an asthmatic who was being very sweet and patient in his suffering: "One would like to breathe for him.""

"Wisdom is the strength of the weak."

"The good is worth more than the best."

"Here is the desert. In this silence, everything speaks to me: and in your noise, everything falls silent."

"The number of books is infinite."

"They cannot accustom themselves to lacking nothing."

"The people. They know how to know, but not how to choose."

"One loves to say what he knows, the other loves to say what he thinks."

"The imagination is the eye of the soul."

"I love to see two truths at the same time. Every good comparison gives the mind this advantage."

"Divorce. Its existence and use should be determined only by the interests of the children."

"To compensate absence with memory."

"To seek wisdom rather than truth. It is more within our grasp."

"Anger makes us adroit."

"The mind can only create errors. Truths are not created, they exist; one can only see them, disentangle them, discover them, and expose them."

"Democracy and slavery are inseparable. Why. Democracy as it existed among the ancients was no more than government by a number of men large enough to be called the people. But this designation is false. The true people, in such a state, the greatest number, the majority belong to the class of slaves, and slavery inevitably develops in a country governed this way, because it is impossible that those who spend their time making laws can make shoes and clothes, plant crops, work fields, etc."

"They do not know how to apply names to things."

"What our eyes see, our imagination can no longer see. The same thing cannot be the object of both kinds of seeing."

"The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye."

"When men are imbeciles, the one who is mad dominates the others."

"God made life to be lived and not to be known."

"Imprisoned in our bodies...and our soul has its windows."

"Don't cut what you can untie."

"All these philosophers are no more than surgeons."

"The weakness of the dying slanders life."

"The staircase that leads to God. What does it matter if it is make-believe, if we really climb it? What difference does it make who builds it, or if it is made of marble or word, of brick, stone, or mud? The essential thing is that it be solid and that in climbing it we feel the peace that is inaccessible to those who do not climb it."

"What good is modesty? — It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly."

"To hide our eyes to make others believe we are hiding tears."

"The truth. They make it consist of nothing they cannot prove. The greatest happiness they find in it is being able to put forth incontestable assertions. This is what they like, and they consider it a sign of prestige, a prerogative, a power, a dignity, etc., a liberation from error."

"Stars more beautiful to the eyes than the telescope that robs them of their illusions."

"To draw up in advance an exact and detailed plan is to deprive our minds of the pleasures of the encounter and the novelty that comes from executing the work. It is to make the execution insipid for us and consequently impossible in works that depends on enthusiasm and imagination. Such a plan is itself a half-work. It must be left imperfect if we want to please ourselves. We must say it cannont be finished. In fact, it must not be for a very good reason: it is impossible. We can, however, draw up such plans for works whose execution and accomplishment are a mechanical thing, a thing that depends above all others on the hand. This is suitable and even very useful for painters, for sculptors. Their senses, with each stroke of the brush or chisel, will find this novelty that did not exist for their minds. Forms and colors, which the imagination cannot represent to us as perfectly as the eye can, will offer the artist a horde of these encounters which are indispensable to giving genius pleasure in work. But the orator, the poet, and the philosopher will not find the same encouragement in writing down what they have already thought. Everything is one for them. Because the words they use have beauty only for the mind and, having been spoken in their head in the same way they are written on the page, the mind no longer has anything to discover in what it wants to say. A plan, however is necessary, but a plan that is vague, that has not been pinned down. We must have above all the notion of the beginning, the end, and the middle of our work. That is to say, we must choose its pitch and range, its pauses, and its objectives. The first word must give the color, the beginning determines the tone; the middle rules the measure, the time, the space, and the proportions."

"It is impossible to love the same person twice."

"To think what we do not feel is to lie to ourselves, in the same way that we lie to others when we say to others what we do not think. Everything we think must be thought with our entire being, body, and soul."

"Memory. — It is a mirror, that retains, and retains forever. Nothing is lost in it, nothing is erased. But it can be tarnished. And then one sees nothing in it."

"Illusion or play. Everything agreeable is in them."

"Adventurous minds, which wait for and receive their ideas only from chance."

"My soul lives in a place where the passions have passed by and where I have known them all."

"They speak to the ear. I want to speak to the memory."