Category: Joubert, Joseph
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The Value of Modesty
Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, tr. Paul Auster, p. 37: What good is modesty? — It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.
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Where a Man Lives
Yet again from Joseph Joubert: Properly speaking, man inhabits only his head and his heart. All other places are vainly before his eyes, at his sides, and under his feet: he himself is not there at all. (Notebooks, p. 126)
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Joubert on Mystical Experience
From The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, p. 29, tr. Paul Auster: Forgetfulness of all earthly things, desire for heavenly things, immunity from all intensity and all disquiet, from all cares and all worries, from all trouble and all effort, the plenitude of work without agitation. The delights of feeling without the work of thought. The…
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On Light
Today I preach on a text from Joseph Joubert: Light. It is a fire that does not burn. (Notebooks, 21) Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low…
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Style and Thought
I sing the praises of Joseph Joubert, but here is a very bad aphorism of his: The style is the thought itself. (Notebooks, p. 44) This is an exaggeration so absurd that not even a Frenchman can get away with it. Much, much better is this brilliancy from the pen of Schopenhauer: Style is the…
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Advice for Contemporary French Philosophers
Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, p. 26: When a thought gives birth to obscurity, it must be rejected, renounced, abandoned. Would that contemporary French scribblers would heed this rule penned by a Frenchman in 1796. But they may not be capable of heeding it since Clarity of mind is not given in all…