281 quotes
When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
The mind is the atmosphere of the soul.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
We comprehend the earth only when we have known heaven. Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
People of intelligence often treat business in the way ignorant people treat books: they understand nothing.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
Everything is game except what makes the soul better or worse.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
One always adds a little of one's soul to what one thinks.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
One can advance a long time in life without aging.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
God has commanded time to console the afflicted.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
God made life to be lived and not to be known.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
Animals love the people who talk to them.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
I would fain coin wisdom,—mould it, I mean, into maxims, proverbs, sentences, that can easily be retained and transmitted.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
The lively phraseology of Montesquieu was the result of long meditation. His words, as light as wings, bear on them grave reflections.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
Neither in the arts, nor in logic, nor in life should an idea by in any way treated as a thing.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
Imitate time. It destroys slowly. It undermines, wears, loosens, separates. It does not uproot.
Pearls of Thought (1881)
All these young minds the revolution has heated up and brought to flower before their time, before their age.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
Do not choose for your wife any woman you would not choose for a friend if she were a man.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
When the last word is always the one that offers itself first, the work becomes difficult.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)
When a truth is better conceived through abstraction, use the abstraction; if not, don't.
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (1883)