The Aphorisms of Joseph Joubert (2001)

Click here for Joubert's Biography
Selections from the Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (Edited by Paul Auster)

from www.paulauster.co.uk/kevinbrown.htm

"The only way to have friends is to throw everything out the window, to keep your door unlocked, and never to know where you will be sleeping at night. . . . there are few people mad enough to act like this. . . . they shouldn't complain about not having any friends." -- 1783

"Democracy and slavery inseparable. . . . 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 in this way, because it is impossible that those who spend their time making laws can make shoes and clothes, plant crops, work fields, etc." -- 1797

"We do not write our books in advance, we do them as we [go along]. What is best about our works is hidden by scaffoldings: our texts are filled with what must be kept and what must be left behind." -- 1797

"the art of writing consists of making sensible and palpable what is abstract. To make abstract what is palpable is . . . vice. " -- 1797

"Psalms. Read them with the intention of praying and you will find them beautiful. . . . doesn't every reading demand a readiness of mind that is special and appropriate to it?" -- 1797

"God made life to be lived (the world to be inhabited) and not to be known." -- 1797

"Beautiful enclosures please us because they clearly [im]print in us the idea of a portion of space; just as a beautiful harmony makes us feel spontaneously and unconsciously the movement and repose that are the elements of time." -- 1797

"The sign . . . makes us forget the thing signified." -- 1797

"modesty . . . makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly." -- 1797

"They make [truth] consist of nothing they cannot prove. The greatest happiness they find in it is being able to put forward incontestable assertions. This is what they like, and they consider it a sign of prestige, a prerogative, a power, a dignity, etc." -- 1797

"Music, [art], architecture, etc. embroider time, embroider space." -- 1797

"A century in which the body has become subtle, in which the mind has become coarse." -- 1797

"Bodies that receive an over-subtle nourishment and minds concerned only with objects that are too real and too hard, are equally depraved." -- 1797

"To reason, to argue . . . is to walk with 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 [all the bases]." -- 1797

"Too much talk . . . too much writing." -- 1798

"In heaven there is a great book. Everything we say, do, and think is written in it." -- 1798

"What do they matter then--sickness, time, old age, death--which are merely the various degrees of a metamorphosis that perhaps only begins here on earth. . . . I would like to be able to remember, however, in that far-distant future, all the fugitive moments of my present life which by then will have been in the eternal past for such a long time. The ones who will be happiest are those who will not have a single moment from their lives that cannot be represented distinctly and with pleasure in memory. 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." (Cf. scene from Blade Runner) -- 1798

"To think what we do not feel is to lie to ourselves, in the same way that we lie to others when we say what we do not think." -- 1798

"ease of expression is harmful to the mind, for no obstacle thwarts it, contains it, makes it cautious, or forces it to choose among its thoughts, a choice it is forced to make in languages that are still new, by the delay that requires it to look for its words and to search through its memory. In this case one can only write with great attention." -- 1798

"Memory . . . is a mirror that retains, and retains forever. Nothing is lost in it, nothing is erased. But it can be tarnished. And then one sees nothing in it." -- 1798

"Beautiful clothes are a sign of joy." -- 1798

"Passions are only natural. It is the lack of repetance that corrupts." -- 1798

"We must treat our lives as we treat our writings, put them in accord, give harmony to the middle, the end, and the beginning. In order to do this, we must make many erasures." -- 1798

"But in fact what is my art? What is the name that distinguishes this art from others? What end does it propose? What does it produce? What does it give birth to and make exist? What do I pretend to do and what do I want to do in doing it? Is it writing in general, to assure myself of being read? . . . 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 is
easy to be determined? This must be examined attentively, at great length, until I know the answer." -- 1799

"Few . . . are capable of inventing a role, many are capable of playing it." -- 1799

". . . through memory a person is one, and . . . without it there is no more I, or at least a continuous I, no more past, no more future, nothing but a numerical and mathematical present that is susceptible neither to addition nor division." -- 1799

"who has the abstract idea of a thing undersands it; but only [he] who can make it understood is able to make it imaginable." -- 1799

"the world known by the ancients . . . seemed more in keeping with the range of human intelligence. . . . they knew better than we do how to envisage all things in a manner appropriate to placing them in our minds. . . . our minds are still astonished by our new discoveries . . . . instead of enlarging our thoughts we enlarge the objects of our thoughts . . . . instead of raising our minds above the world and all things we raise all things above our minds. . . . we turn ourselves into dwarfs in order to produce giants and diminish ourselves to make our conceptions more colossal." -- 1799

"There are truths that instruct, perhaps, but they do not illuminate." -- 1799

"The least thing put between God and us separates us from him. . . . Between him and us there must be a veil, not a wall." -- 1799

"An eye is always watching us." -- 1799

"Solitude gives an 'I'" -- 1799

"Politeness is the art . . . of bearing boredom without being bored." -- 1799

"Singing is not just fittling words and noises together with a certain exactitude and precision. . . . Song must be to speech what verse is to prose." -- 1800

"every author has [his or her] faults. . . . We pardon those who know how to hide them." -- 1800

"I would like thoughts to follow one another in a book like stars in the sky, with order, with harmony, but effortlessly and at intervals, without touching, without mingling; and nevertheless without finding their place, harmonizing, arranging themselves. Yes, I would like them to move without interfering with one another, in such a way that each could survive independently. No overstrict cohesion; but no incoherence either." -- 1800

"Let us not confuse what is merely intelligible, that is to say easily understood, with what is clear." [i.e., what's obvious and what's plain.] -- 1800

"names are correctly applied only when they are NECESSARY NAMES, and they are NECESSARY NAMES only when no others can signify what they signify -- and, if they do not already exist, they would have to be invented." -- 1800

Cliche defined: "Ideas never lack for words. It is words that lack ideas." -- 1800

"sound is made of air, of air that is uttered, vibrant, shaped, articulated." -- 1800

"When I have circumscribed my sphere." -- 1800

"Of words that take up so much attention that they turn us away from the thought. . . . These shocking, astonishing, striking words are sometimes the only way to take a thought palpable. It can be articulated only through them. They are especially capable . . . they alone are capable of brining out the attitudes and movements of the mind, operations that are just as agreeable, just as useful, and just as important to know as the thoughts themselves." -- 1800

"Objects must be described only in order to describe the feelings they evoke in us." -- 1800 (Cf. Mallarmé)

"Do not choose for your wife any woman you would not choose as your friend if she were a man." -- 1801

"Genius begins . . . but labor alone finishes." -- 1801

"Fear feeds the imagination." -- 1802

"Those heavy minds that annoy us with their weight and immobility. You can't make them fly or swim. . . . they grab hold of you and drag you down. . . . Minds that love to wheel around like birds, to rise up, to glide, to wander, to cleave the air in orde to come back to a fixed point, a solid and precise point." - 1802

"Fleeting irrelevancies often serve to stamp solid objects in our memory; a sound, a song, an accent, a voice, a smell engrave forever in our mind the memory of certain places." -- 1802

"we do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us." -- 1802

"to know what one must forbid oneself." -- 1802

"we inhabit the same regions but we do not bring back the same curiosities." -- 1802

"For an expression to be beautiful it must say more than is necessary while . . . saying precisely what it must. . . . there must be abundance and economy." -- 1803

"Severe taste and prodigious imagination." -- 1804

"the soul that has had such thoughts communicates itself to other souls and transfers its repose to them. . . . These thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life." -- 1804

"The heart must walk ahead of the mind, and indulgence ahead of the truth." -- Joseph Joubet, 1804

"To the question: is he guilty? must be added another question: is he incorrigible?" -- 1804

"When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do." -- 1804

"And perhaps we speak . . . well only when we don't know exactly what we are going to say." -- 1804

"They cling to the gates and see only through the bars." -- 1806

"Tacitus. . . . all those words that are obscure only once." -- 1806

"The world is a swollen point." -- 1806

"Racine is the Virgil of the ignorant." -- 1806

"Those who never back down love themselves more than they love the truth." -- 1806

"Those with whom one is happy without saying anything to them." -- 1806

"To translate well, art is needed, and much art." -- 1807

"In living, one learns how to read." -- 1807 [And vice versa] "Every composition has need of some repetition in its parts to be well understood and retained by the memory and to strike us as a whole. In all symmetry, there is a middle. Every middle is the knot of a repetition." -- 1807

"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." -- 1807

"It seems to me . . . that our good qualities are more OURSELVES than our faults." -- 1807

"A [bad] lie is one that can never make itself believed." -- 1807

"People of intelligence often treat business the way ignorant people treat books." -- 1807

"In language there are little words that no one has the slightest idea what to do with. ... used them with great dexterity." -- 1807

"This line [of beauty] must unfold without breaking . . . but it is not possible for the hand to trace it without interruption and without stopping and starting several times." -- 1807

"Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books." -- 1807

"A nail to hang his thoughts on." -- 1807

"Nothing is sacred where God is not." -- 1807 And vice versa?"There is in us a base of joy and contentment. If nothing disturbs this source, if it keeps its purity, if too much earth or sand does not fall into it . . . Otherwise, we feel its sweetness and refreshment and are watered by it only when it overflows." -- 1808

"Maxims, because what is isolated can be seen better." -- 1808

"What makes us look for a long time is that we do not look where we should or that we look where we should not. But how to look where we should when we do not even know what we are looking for? And this is what always happens when we compose and when we create. Fortunately, by straying in this fashion, we make more than one discovery, we have good encounters, and often are repaid for what we have looked for without finding by what we have found without looking for." -- Joseph Joubert

The great inconvenience of new books is that they prevent us from reading old ones." -- 1808

"Philosophy perpetually concerned with what we must believe, and never with what we must do." -- 1808

"Voltaire had the soul of a monkey and the mind of an angel." -- 1808

"freedom to do something well. There is no need of any other kind. . . . truths that teach us to act well and to live well. There is no need of any other kind." -- Joseph Joubert

"Tenderness is the repose of passion." -- 1808

"Whoever consults the light within himself (it is in everyone) excels at judging the objects this light illumines." -- 1808

"A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added and nothing taken away." -- 1808

An aura as "a visible soul". -- 1808

"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." -- 1808

"To let the reader sometimes complete the symmetry between words and to do no more than sugges it." -- 1812

"In order to know men, something must be chanced. Who risks nothing . . . knows nothing." -- 1813

"Peoples . . . have overthrown geography". -- 1813

"Our moments of light are all moments of happines." -- 1813

"To put the soul into physics and the body into metaphysics, if we want the first to be true and the second to be believable. . . . God gave us the power to imagine what our nature has not given us the possibility of seeing." -- 1814

"Retreat often into your sphere, rest yourself in your center, plunge yourself into your element." -- 1814

"Light . . . is beautiful even when it shines on nothing. And when it shines on evil . . . . Even then it is beautiful." -- 1815

"write views or observations, ideas, but not judgments. Our judgments limit our views of things." -- 1815

"artificial elegance . . . comes from an ability without genius and a taste without enthusiasm. LaFontaine: his taste is never without enthusiasm". -- 1815

"A symmetry that everywhere makes itself felt and does not show itself." -- 1816

"If you want to think well, to write well, to act well, first make a 'place' for yourelf, a 'true place'." -- 1818

"There are things we can speak of only in writing, that we cannot know except when thinking of writing them down, and that we cannot, however, think of writing except when we know them in advance." -- 1819

"And perhaps there is no advice to give a writer more important than this: never write anything that does not give you great pleasure." -- 1823

From: http://www.quoteaholic.com/quotes/joseph_joubert.html

"Children need models more than they need critics."

Imagination is the eye of the soul."

To teach is to learn twice.

Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings.

Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.

"Genius begins great works; labour alone finishes them."

"Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable. "

"Imagination is the eye of the soul."

"You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. "

"A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is. To write well, one needs a natural felicity and an acquired difficulty. "

kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.

Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear.

A part of kindness consists in loving people more that they deserve

from www.newadvent.org/cathen/08526a.htm

French philosopher; b. at Martignac (Dordogne), 7 May, 1754, d. at Villeneuve-le-Roi (Yonne), 4 May 1824. At the age of fourteen, having finished his studies in his native town, he was sent to Toulouse to study law, but after a few months joined the Doctrinaires, a teaching order, and was entrusted with the instruction of lower classes. In 1778 he left the order and went to Paris, where he associated with the most famous literary men of the time, Marmontel, Diderot, and d'Alembert, with whose sentiments he was for some time in sympathy. The French Revolution opened his eyes and made him a strong opponent of the doctrines of the eighteenth century. In 1790 he was elected by his countrymen justice of the peace of the canton of Martignac. When his biennial term expired, he refused to accept re-election and returned to Paris, where in the following year (8 June, 1793) he married Mlle Moreau. Disgusted with the tyranny of the Revolutionists, he retired to Villeneuve-le-Roi. Even after the 9th of Thermidor he preferred to live there rather than in Paris. Chateaubriand, Mme de Beaumont, Fontanes, Molé, and Chênedollé were his frequent visitors. In 1809 he was appointed by Fontanes Inspector General of the University of France, and in spite of his poor health fulfilled his duties with the greatest zeal. When he was compelled to give up his inspectorship, he devoted his time to the education of his son and to his literary works. He was one of the first to understand the movement of the Romanticists and to encourage it. Owing to his kind disposition and his delicate taste, as well as his friendly and cheerful character, he had a strong influence over the young men gathered around him. Aiming at what was perfect in literature, he wrote very little and never published anything. He spent his leisure in thinking, and putting down his thoughts for himself. His aim was to note in terse and clear sentences the necessity, utility, and beauty of virtue. After his death, all these papiers de la malle (scraps of paper), as he called them, aroused the interest and admiration of Chateaubriand, who published a short selection of them for private circulation, under the title of "Recueil des Pensées de M. Joubert" (Paris, 1838). This book was re-edited with many additions by Paul Raynal, a nephew of the author, under the new title of "Pensées, Essais, Maximes et Correspondanee de J. Joubert" (Paris, 1842). Many other editions have since been published. Notice historique sur Joubert by his brother, ARMAND JOUBERT (no date and no place of publication), a very valuable and rare document which has just been reprinted by GIRAUD in his new edition of the Pensees (Paris, 1909) . PAILHES, Du nouveau sur Joubert (Paris, 1900); DE RAYNAL. Les correspondants de J. Joubert (Paris, 1885).