Joseph Joubert

Genius begins beautiful works, but only labor finishes them.

Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.

You want to talk to someone: first open your ears.

Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.

Luminous words, like those drops of light we see in fireworks.

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

When a truth is better conceived through abstraction, use the abstraction; if not, don't.

Courage (in a soldier) is maintained by a certain anger; anger is a little blind and likes to strike out. And from this follows a thousand abuses, a thousand evils and misfortunes that are impossible to predict in an army during war.

It is not light that burns, that purifies, that consumes, that divides, and that recomposes; it is fire. And this fire we are talking about always follows light.

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.

You want to explain everything by the facts that are known to you. But the facts that are not known to you? What do they say?

Melancholy: when we have sorrows without a name.