Joseph Joubert

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.

You go to truth by way of poetry and I go to poetry by way of truth.

Let us look for our light in our feelings. There is a warmth in them that contains many clarities.

Retreat often into your sphere, rest yourself in your center, plunge yourself into your element: good advice, which must be remembered.

One must die lovable (if one can).

To write his views or his observations, his ideas, but not his judgments. Our judgments limit our views of things. Some enclosures, but no walls. The man who always write his judgments places before his eyes the calpe and abyla. He goes no further and creates a nec plus ultra. Thus, in the study of wisdom, many views and few judgments.

When we find what we have been looking for, we don't have time to say it. We must die.

A frightening thing, which is perhaps true: "old men want to survive."

In such times, if you want neither to lie nor to wound, you are reduced to being silent.

Reason does not reason. It goes straight to the fact or the consequence.