Quotes from Joseph Joubert

The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.

To teach is to learn twice.

Never cut what you can untie

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Children need models rather than critics.

Misery is almost always the result of thinking.

Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.

The paper is patient, but the reader is not.

The breath of the mind is attention 128

Close your eyes and see.

We may convince others by our arguements, but we can only persuade them by their own

There are those to whom one must advise madness.

Questions show the mind's range, and answers its subtlety.

Everything has its poetry. 94

Children always want to look behind mirrors.

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

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

God is the place where I do not remember the rest.

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.

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

Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.