Joseph Joubert Quotes

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“The good is worth more than the best.”

Joseph Joubert

“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.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“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.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“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.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“To compensate absence with memory.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“"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.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“Reason leads man back to his instincts.”

Joseph Joubert

“Close your eyes and you will see.”

Joseph Joubert

“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.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“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.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“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.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“The breath of the mind is attention.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“Everything we can measure seems small.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“The weakness of the dying slanders life.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“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.”

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

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

Joseph Joubert

“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.”

Joseph Joubert