Joseph Joubert on Mind

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

"Those thoughts that come to us suddenly and that are not yet ours."

"Available. A thought is perfect only when it is perfectly available, that is to say when one can place it and detach it at will."

"One ruins the mind with too much writing. — One rusts it by not writing at all."

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

"Madness is an illness of the brain, not of the mind."

"Adventurous minds, which wait for and receieve their ideas only from chance."

"The things we know when not thinking of them."

"A thought is a thing as real as a cannonball."

"My ideas! It is the house for lodging them that costs me so much to build."

"Beyond the brain, there is something that observes the brain itself."

"An oratorical style often has the same drawbacks as those operas in which the music prevents you from hearing the words. Here the words prevent you from seeing the thoughts."

"All ways of expressing ourselves are good if they make us understood. Thus, if the clarity of our thoughts comes through better in a play of words, then the wordplay is good."

"It's not mental repose they seek, but mental laziness."

"Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking."

"Misery is almost always the result of thinking."

"The breath of the mind is attention."

"Think nothing outside their paper."

"To think what we do not feel is to lie to ourselves, in the same way that we lie to others when we say to others what we do not think. Everything we think must be thought with our entire being, body, and soul."

"Thoughts that are light, clear, distinct, finished; and words that resemble their thoughts. Words that often retain their meaning even when they are detached from others and that please when isolated as sounds."

"Solitude gives an I. I that gives solitude. It is in our thoughts, and the one the world gives, in our feelings. Because solitude grows accustomed to seeing, to contemplating; and the world, to acting for itself."

"But he doesn't finish his sentences," . And they don't finish their thoughts. — To finish their thoughts. — To finish one's thought! It is a long process, it is rare. It gives intense pleasure. Because every finished thought easily enters the mind. They don't have the same need to be beautiful in order to please. It is enough for them to be finished. The situation of the soul that has had such thoughts communicates itself to other souls and transfers its repose to them."