Joseph Joubert Quotes

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

Words are how people think. When you misuse words, you diminish your ability to think clearly and truthfully.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

The ability to express an idea is well nigh as important as the idea itself.

One of the things that writing and speech can do is express what we're thinking one thought at a time.

I often begin a thought with spirit and finish it with nonsense. The chain of my argument often escapes me, and when lost can seldom be retrieved. These faults are so overpowering that I should sink into perpetual silence were it not that sometimes in ardor of debate, when my feelings are wound up to a high tone, elocution pours itself along with unusual rapidity, and I have passages which would not shame a good speaker; this is the only thing that makes me tolerable to others or to myself.

You can't fix a problem if you don't have the words to describe it. You can't even think about it clearly.

I have to sit alone in a room and be alone with my own thoughts. It always starts with an idea, and once the idea grows, I have a concept of what I want to say, and once I go out there and start feeling the energy, that concept grows and becomes whatever it is.

Thought itself needs words. It runs on them like a long wire. And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.

What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallises into formal ideas but its earlier stages.

It is amazing how much a thought expands and refines by being put into speech: I should think it could hardly know itself.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.

If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself

you don't know what you think unless you say it.

Talking about things that are understandable only weighs down the mind.

Pens carry further than rifled cannon.

Conversation is the legs on which thought walks; and writing, the wings by which it flies.

I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.

Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know what they are!

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate and learn, discover and invent.

Good thoughts not delivered mean squat.

As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.