Quotes by Joseph Joubert

• Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love the truth.
• Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.
• Politeness is the flower of humanity.
• Space is the stature of God.
• Space is to place as eternity is to time.
• Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable of.
• You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
• The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk.
• The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.
• The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.
• You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
• There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.
• To teach is to learn twice.
• We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.
• When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.
• Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings.
• Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.
• Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.
• Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman.
• The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.
• The passions of the young are vices in the old.
• 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.
• 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.
• A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.
• All are born to observe order, but few are born to establish it.
• Ask the young. They know everything.
• Be charitable and indulge to everyone, but thyself.
• Children need models rather than critics.
• One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.
• God is the place where I do not remember the rest.
• He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
• 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.
• Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.
• Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
• Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
• Misery is almost always the result of thinking.
• Imagination is the eye of the soul.
• Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.
• Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.
• Justice is the truth in action.
• It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.
• It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
• Innocence is always unsuspicious.
• Never cut what you can untie.