Joseph Joubert Quotes

109 Sourced Quotes

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

Joseph Joubert
If fortune wishes to make a man estimable, she gives him virtues; if she wishes to make him esteemed, she gives him success.

Joseph Joubert
Genuine witticisms surprise those who say them as much as those who listen to them; they arise in us in spite of us, or, at least, without our participation,--like everything inspired.

Joseph Joubert
The true character of epistolary style is playfulness and urbanity.

Joseph Joubert
Antiquity! I love your ruins better than your restorations.

Joseph Joubert
Only just the right quantum of wit should be put into a book; in conversation a little excess is allowable.

Joseph Joubert
Men must be either the slaves of duty, or the slaves of force.

Joseph Joubert
The simple-hearted and sincere never do more than half deceive themselves.

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

Joseph Joubert
Virtue is the health of the soul. It gives a flavor to the smallest leaves of life.

Joseph Joubert
God multiplies intelligence, which communicates itself, like fire, ad infinitum. Light a thousand torches at one touch, the flame remains always the same.

Joseph Joubert
Religion must be loved as a kind of country and nursing-mother. It was religion that nourished our virtues, that showed us heaven, that taught us to walk in the path of duty.

Joseph Joubert
One man finds in religion his literature and his science, another finds in it his joy and his duty.

Joseph Joubert
A few words worthy to be remembered suffice to give an idea of a great mind. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work, a simplicity so finished and so perfect that it equals in merit and in excellence a large and glorious composition.

Joseph Joubert
Religion is a fire which example keeps alive, and which goes out if not communicated.

Joseph Joubert
Logic is to grammar what the sense of words is to their sound.

Joseph Joubert
All disputation makes the mind deaf; and when people are deaf, I am dumb.

Joseph Joubert
Women are women but to become mothers: they go to duty through pleasure.

Joseph Joubert
I do not call reason that brutal reason which crushes with its weight what is holy and sacred, that malignant reason which delights in the errors it succeeds in discovering, that unfeeling and scornful reason which insults credulity.

Joseph Joubert
Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.

Joseph Joubert
In really good acting we should be able to believe that what we hear and see is of our own imagining; it should seem to be to us as a charming dream.

Joseph Joubert
Old age takes from the man of intellect no qualities save those that are useless to wisdom.

Joseph Joubert
The dregs may stir themselves as they please; they fall back to the bottom by their own coarseness.

Joseph Joubert
We should do good whenever we can and do kindness at all times, for at all times we can.

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

Joseph Joubert