Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.
— Joseph Joubert
We must respect the past, and mistrust the present, if we wish to provide for the safety of the future.
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
God is the place where I do not remember the rest.
Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
The passions of the young are vices in the old.
The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.
Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.
Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings.
The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.
The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.
When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.
Innocence is always unsuspicious.
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.
Space is the stature of God.
Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.
Never cut what you can untie.
Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.
Space is to place as eternity is to time.
Ask the young. They know everything.
Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable of.
A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.
Be charitable and indulge to everyone, but thyself.
One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.
Justice is the truth in action.
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.
He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
Only choose in marriage a man whom you would choose as a friend if he were a woman.
Children need models rather than critics.
Grace is in garments, in movements, in manners; beauty in the nude, and in forms. This is true of bodies; but when we speak of feelings, beauty is in their spirituality, and grace in their moderation.
Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.
The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk.
It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
All are born to observe order, but few are born to establish it.
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
Politeness is the flower of humanity.
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.
There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.
Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love the truth.
To teach is to learn twice.
Misery is almost always the result of thinking.