Joseph Joubert Men Quotations

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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