Joseph Joubert Giving Quotations

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

How many weak shoulders have craved heavy burdens!

When you give, give with joy and smiling.

We shall always keep a spare corner in our heads to give passing hospitality to our friends' opinion.

Virtue is the health of the soul. It gives a flavor to the smallest leaves of life.

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

A few words worthy to be remembered suffice to give an idea of a great mind. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work, a simplicity so finished and so perfect that it equals in merit and in excellence a large and glorious composition.

Young authors give their brains much exercise and little food.

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.

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

Science confounds everything; it gives to the flowers an animal appetite, and takes away from even the plants their chastity.

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.