Joseph Joubert Quotes

French moralist and essayist

Joseph Joubert (7 May 1754 – 4 May 1824) was a French moralist and essayist. He published nothing during his lifetime; after his death in 1824, Joubert's widow entrusted his manuscripts to François-René de Chateaubriand, who published a short selection of them for private circulation, under the title Recueil des Pensées de M. Joubert (Collected Thoughts of Mr. Joubert) (Paris, 1838). This volume was subsequently re-edited with many additions by Paul Raynal, a nephew of the author, under the new title of Pensées, Essais, Maximes et Correspondance de J. Joubert (Thoughts, Essays, Maxims and Correspondence of J. Joubert) (Paris, 1842). A selection from his correspondence was published in 1883.

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

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

My ideas! It is the house for lodging them that costs me so much to build.

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

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

All things that are easy to say have already been perfectly said.

Glory. Lovelier to desire than to possess.

For simple light is perhaps still more beautiful than colors.

Thoughts that are light, clear, distinct, finished; and words that resemble their thoughts. Words that often retain their meaning even when they are detached from others and that please when isolated as sounds.

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

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

In the same way crimes have increased laws, errors have increased explanations.

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

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

When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do.