Joseph Joubert Quotes

Time is not a great artist but weakens all he touches.

The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. … All history is taken in by stones.

How massively the mountains stand, while low to the ground the sand blows. The sand blows on and on. And then there are no mountains, none at all, the sand has kissed and whispered them away. And still, the sand blows on.

The cancer of time is eating us away

Time stoops to no man's lure.

Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

No rock so hard but that a little wave may beat admission in a thousand years.

Hope is a slow business.

There are no drive-thru breakthroughs. Breakthroughs take time.

It's a lot easier, she realized, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This would still take time.

Time is the most subtle yet the most insatiable of depredators, and by appearing to take nothing is permitted to take all; nor can it be satisfied until it has stolen the world from us, and us from the world. It constantly flies, yet overcomes all things by flight; and although it is the present ally, it will be the future conqueror of death.

It takes five years for a willing person's mind to change. Have patience with yourself and others when treading in an area protected by a taboo.

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.

I'm the world's original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.

If the river has a soul, it's a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river's brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen.

No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time.

The processes of growth are gradual, bearing fruit in a decade, not a day.

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it. But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.

Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.