Top 250 Joseph Joubert Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Think of the ills from which you are exempt.”

— Joseph Joubert

202. “The paper is patient, but the reader is not.”

— Joseph Joubert

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203. “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

204. “Young authors give their brains much exercise and little food.”

— Joseph Joubert

205. “Politeness smooths wrinkles.”

— Joseph Joubert

206. “Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas.”

— Joseph Joubert

207. “To the liberal ideas of the age must be opposed the moral ideas of all ages.”

— Joseph Joubert

208. “One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet. Joseph Joubert may 16 2002.”

— Joseph Joubert

209. “There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.”

— Joseph Joubert

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210. “The ways suited to confidence are familiar to me, but not those that are suited to familiarity.”

— Joseph Joubert

211. “No one is mediocre who has good sense and good sentiments.”

— Joseph Joubert

212. “We do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us.”

— Joseph Joubert

213. “When we love, it is the heart that judges.”

— Joseph Joubert

214. “Es preciso que exista algo sagrado.”

— Joseph Joubert

215. “The soul that is the abode of chastity acquires an energy which enables her to surmount with ease the obstacles that lie along the path of duty.”

— Joseph Joubert

216. “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.”

— Joseph Joubert

217. “Everything has its poetry. 94.”

— Joseph Joubert

218. “There is graciousness and a kind of urbanity in beginning with men by esteem and confidence. It proves, at least, that we have long lived in good company with others and with our selves.”

— Joseph Joubert

219. “Sexes. One has the look of a wound, the other of something skinned.”

— Joseph Joubert

220. “It is easier to be mistaken about the true than the beautiful.”

— Joseph Joubert

221. “Our worries always come from our weaknesses.”

— Joseph Joubert

222. “Reason is a bee, and exists only on what it makes; his usefulness takes the place of beauty.”

— Joseph Joubert

223. “Our ideals, like pictures, are made from lights and shadows.”

— Joseph Joubert

224. “Today there are no more irreconcilable enmities, because there are no more disinterested emotions: that’s a good thing born from a bad thing.”

— Joseph Joubert

225. “Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.”

— Joseph Joubert

226. “We should make ourselves loved, for men are only just towards those whom they love.”

— Joseph Joubert

227. “Avoid singularity. There may often be less vanity in following the new modes than in adhering to the old ones. It is true that the foolish invent them, but the wise may conform to, instead of contradicting, them.”

— Joseph Joubert

228. “Life is a country that the old have seen, and lived in. Those who have to travel through it can only learn from them.”

— Joseph Joubert

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229. “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.”

— Joseph Joubert

230. “Maxims are to the intellect what laws are to actions; they do not enlighten, but they guide and direct, and, although themselves blind, are protective.”

— Joseph Joubert

231. “In order to be happy, think of the ills you have been spared.”

— Joseph Joubert

232. “Power makes you attractive; it even makes women love old men.”

— Joseph Joubert

233. “To reason, to argue. It is to walk with crutches in search of the truth. We come to it with a leap.”

— Joseph Joubert

234. “Without duty, life is soft and boneless.”

— Joseph Joubert

235. “In these times gain is not only a matter of greed, but of ambition.”

— Joseph Joubert

236. “There are some men who are witty when they are in a bad humor, and others only when they are sad.”

— Joseph Joubert

237. “Speech is but the incorporation of thought.”

— Joseph Joubert

238. “Ornaments were invented by modesty.”

— Joseph Joubert

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

— Joseph Joubert

240. “Order is to arrangement what the soul is to the body, and what mind is to matter.”

— Joseph Joubert

241. “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

242. “We use up in the passions the stuff that was given us for happiness.”

— Joseph Joubert

243. “The dregs may stir themselves as they please; they fall back to the bottom by their own coarseness.”

— Joseph Joubert

244. “Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas. As soon as the idea has come to its last degree of perfection, the word blossoms.”

— Joseph Joubert

245. “Figure, movement. Everything happens, says Pascal, from figure and movement. To say in this case that everything happens from movement, for every figure is no more than the lingering trace of a movement that has already ceased. Thus the letters that I am forming now, for example, are only the pen’s lingering trace of the movement of my hand.”

— Joseph Joubert

246. “Man is born with the faculty of speech. Who gives it to him? He who gives the bird its song.”

— Joseph Joubert

247. “The lively phraseology of Montesquieu was the result of long meditation. His words, as light as wings, bear on them grave reflections.”

— Joseph Joubert

248. “National literature begins with fables and ends with novels.”

— Joseph Joubert

249. “Are you listening to the ones who keep quiet?”

— Joseph Joubert

250. “Luckily, I never feel at one time more than half my pains.”

— Joseph Joubert