Joseph Joubert Quotes

The great inconvenience of new books is that they prevent us from reading the old ones.

All these young minds the revolution has heated up and brought to flower before their time, before their age.

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

Close your eyes and you will see.

The truth. They make it consist of nothing they cannot prove. The greatest happiness they find in it is being able to put forth incontestable assertions. This is what they like, and they consider it a sign of prestige, a prerogative, a power, a dignity, etc., a liberation from error.

During our youth, there is something in us that is better than ourselves, I mean better than our desires, our pleasures, our yieldings, and our inclinations. Our soul is good then, even though our intelligence and will are not.

Fear feeds the imagination.

Madness is an illness of the brain, not of the mind.

What is promised to you in dreams is given to you in dreams!

Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself.

Genius is the aptitude for seeing invisible things, for stirring intangible things, for painting things that have no features.

In living, one learns how to read. (How, and with what result.)

Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so that they are capable, finally, of maintaining a natural flexibility.

All those short-sighted minds see clearly within their little ideas and see nothing in those of others; they are like those bad eyes that see from close range what is obscure and cannot perceive what is clear from afar. Night minds, minds of darkness.

Of what must be said and what must not be said. The importance of knowing.

When we find what we have been looking for, we don't have time to say it. We must die.