Joseph Joubert

(1754–1824)

Joseph Joubert lived in France, and was influenced by the philosophers and artists of his period. He studied philosophy, music, and painting, and was involved in politics. He was surrounded by some of the most prominent people in France.

Joubert's notebooks were not published during his lifetime. The first edition of his notebooks appeared in 1838; 100 years later, a complete version was published in two volumes (900 pages).

The following selections are from The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, edited and translated by Paul Auster. Auster writes, "Joseph Joubert spent his entire adult life recording his thoughts and ideas in notebooks. At first, he looked upon these jottings as a way to prepare himself for a larger, more systematic work, a great book of philosophy that he dreamed he had it in him to write. As the years passed, however, and the great project continued to elude him, he slowly came to realize that the notebooks were an end in themselves. By 1804, he was able to admit that 'These thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life'."

Thought forms in the soul in the same way clouds form in the air.
(1786)

The essential thing is not that there be many truths in a work,
but that no truth be abused.
(1787)

Are you listening to the ones who keep quiet?
(1791)

Through memory we travel against time,
through forgetfulness we follow its course.
(1791)

We are in the world as words are in a book.
Each generation is like a line, a phrase.
(1791)

Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking.
(1791)

Wisdom is the strength of the weak.
(1793)

In their words one hears the tinkling of their brains.
(1793)

Here is the desert.
In this silence everything speaks to me:
and in your noise everything falls silent.
(1794)

Light. It is fire that does not burn.
(1795)

Give me a morality that equally suits the healthy and the sick,
men and women, children, adults, and old people.
(1796)

I love to see two truths at the same time.
Every good comparison gives the mind this advantage.
(1796)

God is the place where I do not remember the rest.
(1796)

To seek wisdom rather than truth.
It is more within our grasp.
(1797)

Lovers.
Whoever does not have their weaknesses
cannot have their strengths.
(1797)

The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye.
(1797)

The dying inherit the dead.
(1797)

Don't cut what you can untie.
(1797)

All these philosophers are no more than surgeons.
(1797)

Where do thoughts go?
Into the memory of God.
(1797)

What is a diamond, if not a bit of gleaming mud?
(1798)

The only good in man is his young feelings and his old thoughts.
(1798)

…This spark that unexpectedly fell on my childhood
and burned my entire youth.
(1798)

…They have learned that what they no longer wish not to know
is very difficult to know,
and in itself this is a kind of knowledge…
(1798)

How it happens that only in looking for words do we find thoughts.
(1799)

There are those to whom one must advise madness.
(1799)

Let us remember that everything is double.
(1799)

Old men, when neglected, have no more wisdom.
(1799)

…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…
(1800)

The word, in fact, is disembodied thought.
(1800)

…Water, as the poets say, is a liquid crystal.
(1800)

Everything is a game except what makes the soul better or worse.
(1800)

Solitude gives an I…
(1800)

Politeness is the art of being bored without boredom
or (if you prefer) of bearing boredom without being bored.
(1800)

…Sadness is inaction…
(1800)

…Song must be to speech what verse is to prose.
(1800)

The poet must not cross an interval with a step
when he can cross it with a leap.
(1800)

The things that we know when not thinking of them.
(1800)

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.
(1800)

…What is seeing?
It is to have an idea of what is before our eyes
without having to think about it.
(1800)

Close your eyes and you will see.
(1801)

The poet. He paints passions under glass.
(1801)

…The imagination is an eye where images remain forever.
(1801)

…Harmony is in the one who listens…
(1801)

We are all old children…
(1801)

It seems more difficult to me to be a modern than to be an ancient.
(1801)

…To penetrate a thought and to produce a thought
are almost the same action.
(1802)

One would say that in such dark eyes there is a flame without light.
(1802)

Fear feeds the imagination.
(1802)

Imagining is good, provided you do not believe you see
what can only be imagined.
(1802)

The child speaks words with his memory
long before he speaks them with his tongue.
(1802)

…And let the skeletons smile. Horrible amusements.
(1803)

I feel the almond in the shell,
the water in the earth,
the fire in the stone.
(1803)

Words like so many tiny wheels.
(1803)

They speak to the ear,
I want to speak to the memory.
(1803)

Once we have tasted the juice of words,
the mind can no longer pass them by.
We drink thought from them.
(1805)

To judge things of taste,
we must give ourselves time to taste them.
(1805)

All reflection is art.
(1805)

…When we speak, we write what we are saying in the air.
(1805)

I don't like to write anything down on paper
that I would not say to myself.
(1806)

Illusions come from heaven and mistakes come from us.
(1806)

Marble is concentrated air.
I would call the diamond condensed light.
The world is a swollen point.
(1806)

Those we never back down love themselves
more than they love the truth.
(1806)

I have too much brain for my head.
It cannot play comfortably in its box.
(1806)

There must be several voices together in one voice
for it to be beautiful.
And several meanings in one word
for it to be beautiful.
(1806)

For wine is a wet fire.
(1806)

What is promised to you in dreams is given to you in dreams!
(1807)

Excess and the too much are not the same thing.
Excess is worthless, the too much is often necessary.
(1807)

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

A dark point in his mind is as unbearable to him
as a grain of sand in his eye.
(1807)

Maxims, because what is isolated can be seen better.
(1808)

The truth! Only God sees it.
(1808)

Reminiscence is an operation whereby the mind picks up
the trail of its memories in order to find the memory it has lost.
(1808)

…The talkative man speaks from his mouth,
the eloquent man speaks from his heart.
(1809)

When you no longer love what is beautiful,
you can no longer write.
(1815)

Melancholy: when we have sorrows without a name.
(1817)

Selections from Joubert and Space,
an essay by Maurice Blanchot
(translated by Lydia Davis)

Joubert had his gift. He never wrote a book. He only prepared to write one, resolutely seeking the exact conditions that would allow him to write it. Then he forgot even this plan. More precisely, what he was seeking—this source of writing, this space in which to write, this light to circumscribe in space—demanded of him, affirmed in him inclinations that made him unfit for all ordinary literary work, or made him turn away from it. In this he was one of the first completely modern writers, preferring the center to the sphere, sacrificing results to the discovery of their conditions, and writing not in order to add one book to another but to take command of the point from which it seemed to him all books issued, the point which, once it was found, would relieve him of the need to write any books.

Why didn't Joubert write books? Early in his life he is attentive only to what is written, interested only in writing…. In middle age, his best friends are famous writers, with whom he lives a literary life and who, knowing his incomparable talent for thought and form, also gently goad him out of his silence. Beyond that, he is in no way a man paralyzed by difficulties of expression: his numerous and extensive letters are written with that aptitude for writing that is in some sense the gift of his century and to which he adds witty nuances and embellishments of phrasing that show he is always happy to talk and happy in words. Yet this extremely capable man, who writes almost every day in a notebook he has near him, does not publish anything and leaves nothing to be published….

…What he knows is that he is seeking what he does not know and that this is the source of the difficulty of his search and the happiness of his discoveries….

…Space—this is, really, the core of his experience, what he finds when he thinks about writing, what he finds close to all writing, the marvel of intimacy that makes literary expression at once a thought and the echo of that thought….

During his nights of insomnia, Joubert goes out and contemplates the sky…. What do these nocturnal reflections give to him? The very thing that is inside him, but realized outside: that supreme book that it seems he will never write, and that he is writing in some sense without knowing it, by thinking about writing it….