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I do not call reason that brutal reason which crushes with its weight what is holy and sacred, that malignant reason which delights in the errors it succeeds in discovering, that unfeeling and scornful reason which insults credulity.

Joseph Joubert

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Joseph Joubert
Age: 69 †
Born: 1754
Born: May 7
Died: 1824
Died: May 4
Essayist
Philosopher
Writer
Delight
Credulity
Sacred
Succeeds
Weight
Delights
Succeed
Brutal
Scornful
Holy
Discovering
Malignant
Call
Crush
Unfeeling
Reason
Insult
Crushes
Errors
Insults

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Let your cry be for free souls rather than for freedom. Moral liberty is the only important liberty.
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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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God is the place where I do not remember the rest.
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Thus, if the clarity of our thoughts comes through better in a play of words, then the wordplay is good. One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them.
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Maxims are to the intellect what laws are to actions they do not enlighten, but they guide and direct, and, although themselves blind, are protective.
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How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.
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The lively phraseology of Montesquieu was the result of long meditation. His words, as light as wings, bear on them grave reflections.
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Misery is almost always the result of thinking.
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Genuine bon mots surprise those from whose lips they fall, no less than they do those who listen to them.
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The evening of a well spent youth brings it's lamps with it.
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History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.
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You have to be like the pebble in the stream, keeping the grain and rolling along without being dissolved or dissolving anything else.
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We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.
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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!
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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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Old age takes from the man of intellect no qualities save those that are useless to wisdom.
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Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.
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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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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.
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Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.
Joseph Joubert