“Wicked people have nothing human about them except passions: they are almost their virtues.”
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Joseph Joubert 253
French moralist and essayist 1754–1824Related quotes
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of these two spirits of dominion.
De historie kan niets voorspellen, behalve één ding: dat geen groote wending in de menschelijke verhoudingen ooit uitkomt in den vorm, waarin vroeger levenden zich haar hebben kunnen verbeeld.
Source: In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1936), Ch. 20.
"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)
IX. On Providence, Fate, and Fortune.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Il y a dans le coeur humain une génération perpétuelle de passions, en sorte que la ruine de l'une est presque toujours l'établissement d'une autre.
Maxim 10.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
