281 quotes
One can, with dignity, be wife and widow but once.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
How many weak shoulders have craved heavy burdens?
Pearls of Thought (1881)
Religion is the only metaphysics that the multitude can understand and adopt.
All the passions seek after whatever nourishes them. Fear loves the idea of danger.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
Truth takes the stamp of the souls it enters. It is rigorous and rough in arid souls, but tempers and softens itself in loving natures.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
Remorse is the punishment of crime; repentance its expiation. The former appertains to a tormented conscience; the latter to a soul changed for the better.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
Fully to understand a grand and beautiful thought requires, perhaps, as much time as to conceive it.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
In the present day our literary masonry is well done, but our architecture is poor.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
Old age deprives the intelligent man only of qualities useless to wisdom.
History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
The soul speaks to itself in parables. Like those dreams that have pleased us.
Let us be men with men, and always children before God; for in His eyes we are but children. Old age itself, in presence of eternity, is but the first moment of a morning.
Thus, if the clarity of our thoughts comes through better in a play of words, then the wordplay is good. One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them.
Le génie commence les beaux ouvrages, mais le travail seul les achève.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
When a nation gives birth to a man who is able to produce a great thought, another is born who is able to understand and admire it.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
Wicked people have nothing human about them except passions: they are almost their virtues.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
The important business of man is life, and the important business of life is death.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
Genius is the aptitude for seeing invisible things, for stirring intangible things, for painting things that have no features.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
Those who never back down love themselves more than they love the truth.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)