Top 250 Joseph Joubert Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.”

— Joseph Joubert

102. “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

103. “It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102.”

— Joseph Joubert

104. “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.”

— Joseph Joubert

105. “Attention is like a narrow mouthed vessel; pour into it what you have to say cautiously, and, as it were, drop by drop.”

— Joseph Joubert

106. “Questions show the mind’s range, and answers its subtlety.”

— Joseph Joubert

107. “Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.”

— Joseph Joubert

108. “A maxim is the exact and noble expression of an important and indisputable truth. Good maxims are the germs of all excellence; when firmly fixed on the memory, they nourish the will.”

— Joseph Joubert

109. “When my friends lack an eye, I look at them in profile.”

— Joseph Joubert

110. “Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.”

— Joseph Joubert

111. “The mind’s direction is more important than its progress.”

— Joseph Joubert

112. “History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.”

— Joseph Joubert

113. “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.”

— Joseph Joubert

114. “The sound of the drum drives out thought; for that very reason it is the most military of instruments.”

— Joseph Joubert

115. “Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.”

— Joseph Joubert

116. “The simple-hearted and sincere never do more than half deceive themselves.”

— Joseph Joubert

117. “Think that day lost whose descending sun, views from thy hand no noble action done.”

— Joseph Joubert

118. “Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features.”

— Joseph Joubert

119. “The supreme sway of chastity over the senses makes her queenly.”

— Joseph Joubert

120. “Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself.”

— Joseph Joubert

121. “When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come.”

— Joseph Joubert

122. “Virtue is the health of the soul. It gives a flavor to the smallest leaves of life.”

— Joseph Joubert

123. “A thought is a thing as real as a cannonball.”

— Joseph Joubert

124. “Misery is almost always the result of thinking.”

— Joseph Joubert

125. “All luxury corrupts either the morals or the taste.”

— Joseph Joubert

126. “A man who shows no defect is a fool or a hypocrite, whom we should mistrust. There are defects so bound to fine qualities that they announce them, – defects which it is well not to correct.”

— Joseph Joubert

127. “Grief – Happiness is to feel that one’s soul is good; there is no other, in truth, and this kind of happiness may exist even in sorrow, so that there are griefs perfable to every joy, and such as would be preferred by all those who have felt them.”

— Joseph Joubert

128. “To be capable of respect is almost as rare as to be worthy of it.”

— Joseph Joubert

129. “I love prudence very little, if it is not moral.”

— Joseph Joubert

130. “When credulity comes from the heart it does no harm to the intellect.”

— Joseph Joubert

131. “Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.”

— Joseph Joubert

132. “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.”

— Joseph Joubert

133. “Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.”

— Joseph Joubert

134. “Every legitimate authority should respect its extent and its limits.”

— Joseph Joubert

135. “Grace imitates modesty, as politeness imitates kindness.”

— Joseph Joubert

136. “We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live.”

— Joseph Joubert

137. “The early and the latter part of human life are the best, or, at least, the most worthy of respect; the one as the age of innocence, the other of reason.”

— Joseph Joubert

138. “Xenophon wrote with a swan’s quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a brazen stylus.”

— Joseph Joubert

139. “Cercando la parola si trovano i pensieri.”

— Joseph Joubert

140. “A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is. To write well, one needs a natural felicity and an acquired difficulty.”

— Joseph Joubert

141. “Be charitable and indulge to everyone, but thyself.”

— Joseph Joubert

142. “I quit Paris unwillingly, because I must part from my friends; and I quit the country unwillingly, because I must part from myself.”

— Joseph Joubert

143. “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.”

— Joseph Joubert

144. “Know that morality is a curb, not a spur.”

— Joseph Joubert

145. “Of what delights are we deprived by our excesses!”

— Joseph Joubert

146. “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

147. “Chance generally favors the prudent.”

— Joseph Joubert

148. “It is always our inabilities that vex us.”

— Joseph Joubert

149. “The passions of the young are vices in the old.”

— Joseph Joubert

150. “Genuine bon mots surprise those from whose lips they fall, no less than they do those who listen to them.”

— Joseph Joubert