Joseph Joubert Men Quotations

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

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

Old age takes from the man of intellect no qualities save those that are useless to wisdom.

Success serves men as a pedestal. It makes them seem greater when not measured by reflection.

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

No one is mediocre who has good sense and good sentiments.

When a nation gives birth to a man who is able to produce a great thought, another is born who is able to understand and admire it.

The talkative man speaks from his mouth, the eloquent man speaks from his heart.

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.

Old age deprives the intelligent man only of qualities useless to wisdom.

Happy is the man who can do only one thing; in doing it, he fulfills his destiny.

Ornaments were invented by modesty.

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

The punishment of those who have loved women too much is to love them always.

Haughty people seem to me to have, like the dwarfs, the stature of a child and the face of a man.

Forms of government become established of themselves. They shape themselves, they are not created. We may give them strength and consistency, but we cannot call them into being. Let us rest assured that the form of government can never be a matter of choice: it is almost always a matter of necessity.

Men must be either the slaves of duty, or the slaves of force.

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.

If fortune wishes to make a man estimable, she gives him virtues; if she wishes to make him esteemed, she gives him success.

Fancy, an animal faculty, is very different from imagination, which is intellectual. The former is passive; but the latter is active and creative. Children, the weak minded, and the timid are full of fancy. Men and women of intellect, of great intellect, are alone possessed of great imagination.

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.

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.

One should choose for a wife only such a woman as he would choose for a friend, were she a man.

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

One man finds in religion his literature and his science, another finds in it his joy and his duty.

Men have torn up the roads which led to Heaven, and which all the world followed; now we have to make our own ladders.

One day, a daughter of Aristotle, Pythias by name, was asked what color pleased her most. She replied, "The color with which modesty suffuses the face of simple, inoffensive men.

I would fain coin wisdom,—mould it, I mean, into maxims, proverbs, sentences, that can easily be retained and transmitted. Would that I could denounce and banish from the language of men—as base money—the words by which they cheat and are cheated!

What a man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm.

Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.

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

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.

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

TIME and truth are friends, though there are many moments hostile to truth.

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

There is a physical weakness which stems from mental ability, and a mental weakness which comes from physical ability

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without debate.