Quotes from Joseph Joubert

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.

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

Tenderness is the repose of passion.

Are you listening to the ones who keep quiet?

Space is to place as eternity is to time.

How many people eat, drink, and get married; buy, sell, and build; make contracts and attend to their for-tune; have friends and enemies, pleasures and pains, are born, grow up, live and die ? but asleep!

A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve

The soul paints itself in our machines.

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.

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

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

Enseigner, c'est apprendre deux fois

Es preciso que exista algo sagrado

Cercando la parola si trovano i pensieri.

Há pessoas que, da moral, só têm um pedaço. É um tecido de que nunca farão um fato.

We love repose of mind so well, that we are arrested by anything which has even the appearance of truth; and so we fall asleep on clouds.

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

Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.

It is an aspect of all happiness to suppose that we deserve it.

For worldly success, we need virtues that make us loved and faults that make us feared.

Tenderness is the repose of passion. — Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert . (NYRB Classics; Main edition May 10, 2005) Originally published October 1983.

El objetivo de la argumentación o de la discusión, no debe de ser la victoria, si no el progreso

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

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