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We do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us.

Joseph Joubert

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Joseph Joubert
Age: 69 †
Born: 1754
Born: May 7
Died: 1824
Died: May 4
Essayist
Philosopher
Writer
Power
Best
Wells
Assured
Well
Touched
Excellence
Except
Hold
Within

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Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features
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Ornaments were invented by modesty.
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Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
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A temperate style is alone classical.
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There are people who are virtuous only in a piece-meal way virtue is a fabric from which they never make themselves a whole garment.
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What can you possibly add to a mind that's full, especially one that's full of itself.
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One man finds in religion his literature and his science, another finds in it his joy and his duty.
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We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.
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Beautiful works do not intoxicate, but they enchant.
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In these times gain is not only a matter of greed, but of ambition.
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Know that morality is a curb, not a spur.
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Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.
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Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.
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Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas. As soon as the idea has come to its last degree of perfection, the word blossoms.
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Genuinely good remarks surprise their author as well as his audience.
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A false mind is false in everything, just as a cross eye always looks askant. But one may err once, nay, a hundred times, without being double-minded. There can never be mental duplicity where there is sincerity.
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When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion.
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There is in the soul a taste for the good, just as there is in the body an appetite for enjoyment.
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The soul paints itself in our machines.
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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.
Joseph Joubert