The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
-- Joseph Joubert
One who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
-- Joseph Joubert
It is better to stir up a question without deciding it, than to decide it without stirring it up.
-- Joseph Joubert
It is better to debate a question without deciding it than to decide it without debate.
-- Joseph Joubert
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
-- Joseph Joubert
If authorities were well organized, there would not be an Unknown Warrior.
-- Joseph Joubert
To teach is to learn twice.
-- Joseph Joubert
Lightning flashes that cross the mind and illuminate so quickly they are hardly noticed. In such cases, more is seen than retained. Thus, whoever does not observe himself carries within him some experience he does not know about.
-- Joseph Joubert
Do you want to know how thought functions, to know its effects? Read the poets. Do you want to know about morality, about politics? Read the poets. What pleases you in them, deepen: it is the truth.
-- Joseph Joubert
A work of genius, whether poetic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in one day.
-- Joseph Joubert
The soul paints itself in our machines.
-- Joseph Joubert
All truths are double or doubled, or they all have a front and a back.
-- Joseph Joubert
Roundness. This shape guarantees matter a long life. Time does not know where to take hold of it.
-- Joseph Joubert
Dreams. Their lantern is magical.
-- Joseph Joubert
Nimbleness. Agility of mind. These works are no more than perilous leaps into space.
-- Joseph Joubert
Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.
-- Joseph Joubert
Lovers. Whoever does not have their weaknesses cannot have their strengths.
-- Joseph Joubert
The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye.
-- Joseph Joubert
Don't cut what you can untie.
-- Joseph Joubert
“Yes, please cut up the pieces for me,” he said, “but don't chew them.”
-- Joseph Joubert
Do not say the word that completes the symmetry of your sentence and rounds it off when the reader will inevitably think of it and say it to himself after having read the words that precede it.
-- Joseph Joubert
Remember to let your ink grow ripe.
-- Joseph Joubert
To reason, to argue. It is to walk in crutches in search of the truth. We come to it with a leap. We must use reasoning to make sure we have reached the end and that we have covered the whole path. Likewise in the stadium, the runner touches the stone with his hands and steps back to see the barrier in front of the goal.
-- Joseph Joubert
These false rules only serve to persuade those who observe them that they have attained what they cannot attain.
-- Joseph Joubert
There as here our memories (which will be sharp) will make up the better part of what is good and bad in us. This very moment that I am speaking to you, this moment in which I am saying this, will be repeated forever. Man lets time get lost, but there are no lost moments.
-- Joseph Joubert
How it happens that in searching for words we come to ideas. Words are the bodies of thoughts.
-- Joseph Joubert
Beyond bodies, beyond worlds, beyond everything, -- beyond and around bodies, beyond and around worlds, beyond and around everything, there is light and there is mind. Without minds, I mean the elemental mind, everything would be full and nothing would be penetrable; there would be no movement, no circulation, no life.
-- Joseph Joubert
Newton. It is no more true that he has discovered the system of the world than it is true that someone who balances the accounts of an administration has discovered a system of government.
-- Joseph Joubert
Like Daedalus, I am forging myself wings. I construct them little by little, adding one feather each day.
-- Joseph Joubert
When you want transparency, the finite, the smooth, and the beautiful, you must polish for a long time.
-- Joseph Joubert
Is it writing in general, to assure myself of being read? The one ambition of so many people! Is that all I want? Am I no more than a polymath? Or do I have a class of ideas that is easy to label and whose nature, character, merit, and use can be determined?
-- Joseph Joubert
Our eye prevents us from seeing: it is our body that prevents us from touching. Between us and the truth there are our senses, which introduce a part of the truth in us and which also separate us from it.
-- Joseph Joubert
Each man thinks not what he has been told but what he understands.
-- Joseph Joubert
Children. Need models more than critics.
-- Joseph Joubert
He who has the abstract idea of a thing understands it; but only he who can make it understood is able to make it imaginable.
-- Joseph Joubert
There are truths that instruct, perhaps, but they do not illuminate. In this class are all the truths of reasoning.
-- Joseph Joubert
Let us not confuse what is merely intelligible, that is to say, easily understood, with what is clear.
-- Joseph Joubert
Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas. As soon as the idea has come to its last degree of perfection, the word blossoms; or, if you like, it blossoms from the word that presents it and clothes it.
-- Joseph Joubert
If a blind man asked me: "What is light?" I would answer: "What makes us see." -- "What is seeing?" -- "It is to have an idea of what is before the eyes without having to think about it.
-- Joseph Joubert
But the idea of the nest in the bird's mind, where does it come from?
-- Joseph Joubert
You say that books are soon read, but they are not soon understood. To digest them, etc. To understand a beautiful or great thought perhaps requires the same amount of time it takes to have it, to conceive of it. To penetrate a thought and to produce a thought are almost the same action.
-- Joseph Joubert
Speak more softly to be better heard by a deaf public.
-- Joseph Joubert
Happy people strike me as children; people who are too serious and especially those who are proud strike me as dwarfs. Or rather, those who are vain strike me as children; those who are prideful strike me as dwarfs. -- Children and dwarfs. Their difference: a dwarf is the size of a child, but with a man's face.
-- Joseph Joubert
If I vanish from your view, it is because I travel with another.
-- Joseph Joubert
The same feature that is agreeable when it is fleeting becomes hideous when it remains fixed. That is because mobility is the essence of what is agreeable.
-- Joseph Joubert
Then there comes into languages a facility and an overabundance that, if you want to become a great writer, you must oppose with difficulties, with a sure taste, a meditated choice. When you find a torrent, obstacles must be placed in it.
-- Joseph Joubert
The useless phrases that come into the head. The mind is grinding its colors.
-- Joseph Joubert
Descartes. His imaginary world is not an imaginable world. In it the mind finds matter everywhere, and figures rather than form. (For the form is the figure of the figure, and the figure is the body of the form, the form is the exterior soul of a body.) Descartes has thus made the imagination do what it does not like to do. He has made it arrange stones. It wants to be an architect: he has restricted it to being a mason.
-- Joseph Joubert
Once we have tasted the juice of words, the mind can no long pass them by. We drink thought from them.
-- Joseph Joubert
We are afraid of having and showing a small mind and we are not afraid of having and showing a small heart.
-- Joseph Joubert
All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.
-- Joseph Joubert
The great inconvenience of new books is that they prevent us from reading old books.
-- Joseph Joubert
The talkative person is someone who speaks more than he thinks. Someone who thinks a great deal and who talks a great deal is never considered a talkative person. The talkative man speaks from his mouth, the eloquent man speaks from his heart.
-- Joseph Joubert
All cries and all complaints exhale a vapor, and from this vapor a cloud is formed, and from these heaped-up clouds come thunder, storms, the inclemencies that destroy everything.
-- Joseph Joubert
Words. Magic utterances by which we enthrall one another in everyday trances.
-- Joseph Joubert
When you no longer love what is beautiful, you can no longer write.
-- Joseph Joubert
When everything becomes unbearable... That is the rule. Then necessity makes the law, or changes it.
-- Joseph Joubert
And there is perhaps no advice to give a writer more important than this: -- Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure.
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