Joseph Joubert

Genius begins beautiful works, but only labor finishes them.

Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.

You want to talk to someone: first open your ears.

Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.

When a truth is better conceived through abstraction, use the abstraction; if not, don't.

Courage (in a soldier) is maintained by a certain anger; anger is a little blind and likes to strike out. And from this follows a thousand abuses, a thousand evils and misfortunes that are impossible to predict in an army during war.

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.

You want to explain everything by the facts that are known to you. But the facts that are not known to you? What do they say?

Melancholy: when we have sorrows without a name.

It is better to be concerned with being than with nothingness. Dream therefore of what you still have rather than what you have lost.

Nothing is better than a justified enthusiasm.

Madness is an illness of the brain, not of the mind.