Joseph Joubert Quotes

The imagination is the eye of the soul.

The truth. They make it consist of nothing they cannot prove. The greatest happiness they find in it is being able to put forth incontestable assertions. This is what they like, and they consider it a sign of prestige, a prerogative, a power, a dignity, etc., a liberation from error.

Pride swells the brain. Vanity carries with it smoke, minds. Hatred tightens the heart. Love warms the lungs. Admiration stops the heart. We breathe through desire. We want to pump up all that delights, and dilates. Sadness is inaction. The love that comes from the blood, the love that comes from the soul.

For in spite of ourselves we respect those whom we see respected.

Fear feeds the imagination.

What our eyes see, our imagination can no longer see. The same thing cannot be the object of both kinds of seeing.

People of intelligence often treat business in the way ignorant people treat books: they understand nothing.

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

...burdened with the unbearable weight of ourselves.

A book that reveals the mind is worth more than one that only reveals its subject.

To descend into ourselves, we must first lift ourselves up.

The phrase, "One dies before one has lived."

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.