Joseph Joubert on Knowledge

"People of intelligence often treat business in the way ignorant people treat books: they understand nothing."

"One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them. One must know how to leave one's own ideas and how to come back to them."

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

"To be pathetic when we cry, we must cry without wanting to and without knowing it."

"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?"

"What man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm."

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

"I know too well what I am going to say. I know it too well before writing."

"It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him."

"He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet."

"To teach is to learn twice over."

"The people. They know how to know, but not how to choose."

"They do not know how to apply names to things."

"To know: it is to see inside oneself."

"Ask the young. They know everything."

"The hordes of words that fill our books proclaim our ignorance, reveal the obscurities that flood our knowledge. If we were perfectly enlightened, our moral books would contain only maxims and our books on physics and spirituality would contain only axioms and facts. Everything else is clutter and shows no more than our gropings, our efforts, and our difficulties."

"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, this thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so they are capable, finally, or 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. Night minds, minds of darkness."