Joseph Joubert Quotes

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“The good is worth more than the best.”

“Pride swells the brain. Vanity carries with it smoke, minds. Hatred tightens the heart. Love warms the lungs. Admiration stops the heart. We breathe through desire. We want to pump up all that delights, and dilates. Sadness is inaction. The love that comes from the blood, the love that comes from the soul.”

“Once we have tasted the juice of words, our mind can no longer pass them by. We drink thought from them.”

“One must be an illusionary rather than a visionary.”

“All clear and transparent words appear to be beautiful sounds. Yes and no are not precisely clear words, but definite words. In clear words, there is more light than movement or attitude.”

“It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.”

“The people. They know how to know, but not how to choose.”

“To be pathetic when we cry, we must cry without wanting to and without knowing it.”

“Let anger pass, make a place for it; do not impede its progress; do not disturb its development, give it the time it needs to die out, open a wide path for it.”

“I have not seen you since, but you have often appeared to me in my dreams.”

“No, men are not born to know, but they are destined for it.”

“Retreat often into your sphere, rest yourself in your center, plunge yourself into your element: good advice, which must be remembered.”

“Little people have few passions, they hardly have anything but needs.”

“There is nothing serious in civil life except good and evil, vice and virtue. Everything else in it should be a game.”

“All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.”

“To compensate absence with memory.”

“Do not choose for your wife any woman you would not choose for a friend if she were a man.”

“"But he doesn't finish his sentences," (he said). And they don't finish their thoughts. — To finish their thoughts. — To finish one's thought! It is a long process, it is rare. It gives intense pleasure. Because every finished thought easily enters the mind. They don't have the same need to be beautiful in order to please. It is enough for them to be finished. The situation of the soul that has had such thoughts communicates itself to other souls and transfers its repose to them.”

“Does talent have any need of passions? Yes, of many passions — repressed.”

“Here is the desert. In this silence, everything speaks to me: and in your noise, everything falls silent.”

“Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.”

“Reason leads man back to his instincts.”

“Close your eyes and you will see.”

“It is not simply a matter of distinguishing between good and evil, but also of not confusing what is laughable with what is not. To make laughable what is not is in some way to make bad what was good.”

“Those thoughts that come to us suddenly and that are not yet ours.”

“The staircase that leads to God. What does it matter if it is make-believe, if we really climb it? What difference does it make who builds it, or if it is made of marble or word, of brick, stone, or mud? The essential thing is that it be solid and that in climbing it we feel the peace that is inaccessible to those who do not climb it.”

“We must try, as much as possible, not to mistrust anyone.”

“It is better to be concerned with being than with nothingness. Dream therefore of what you still have rather than what you have lost.”

“The hordes of words that fill our books proclaim our ignorance, reveal the obscurities that flood our knowledge. If we were perfectly enlightened, our moral books would contain only maxims and our books on physics and spirituality would contain only axioms and facts. Everything else is clutter and shows no more than our gropings, our efforts, and our difficulties.”

“These thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life.”

“In political institutions, almost everything we call an abuse was once a remedy.”

“Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.”

“The breath of the mind is attention.”

“I know too well what I am going to say. I know it too well before writing.”

“The phrase, "One dies before one has lived."”

“Everything we can measure seems small.”

“I did not have good eyes nor light in my mind that day.”

“The weakness of the dying slanders life.”

“Someone said of an asthmatic who was being very sweet and patient in his suffering: "One would like to breathe for him."”

“We use up in the passions the stuff that was given us for happiness.”

“We are all old children, more or less serious, more or less filled with ourselves.”

“What our eyes see, our imagination can no longer see. The same thing cannot be the object of both kinds of seeing.”

“It is very difficult to be wise (through the mind); it is not difficult to be wise occasionally and by chance, but it is difficult to be wise assiduously and by choice.”

“When we speak, we write what we are saying in the air.”

“Beyond the brain, there is something that observes the brain itself.”

“It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas.”

“Politeness is the art of bearing boredom without being bored.”

“When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.”

“Democracy and slavery are inseparable. Why. Democracy as it existed among the ancients was no more than government by a number of men large enough to be called the people. But this designation is false. The true people, in such a state, the greatest number, the majority belong to the class of slaves, and slavery inevitably develops in a country governed this way, because it is impossible that those who spend their time making laws can make shoes and clothes, plant crops, work fields, etc.”