Joseph Joubert Quotes

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep

There is no man so blind as one who has made up his mind.

I feel like people who are guarded and shut off, I feel like they should have to wear a button that says, "shut down", "guarded" or something.

I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented.

The smaller your reality, the more convinced you are that you know everything.

I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night.

There's something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the world really is, and how far apart we all are.

The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself.

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot

On the one side was bigotry, ignorance, hatred, superstition, every sort of blackness that the human mind is capable of. On the other side was sense.

I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)

I only work at night, generally. Usually when I work [during the day] I'll black out the windows or something.

All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

The human heart cries out for help; the human soul implores us for deliverance; but we do not heed their cries, for we neither hear nor understand. But the man who hears and understands we call mad, and flee from him. Thus the nights pass, and we live in unawareness; and the days greet us and embrace us. But we live in constant dread of day and night.

The losers in life think they have all the answers. They can’t learn because they’re too busy telling everyone what they know.

Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.

Commonplace minds usually condemn what is beyond the reach of their understanding.

Be still my tongue, for i know not what to say; My life is lived in darkness and here i will remain.

Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloudcover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I'm already under and living within the ocean.

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

Fear and Bigotry are bred fom isolation and ignorance. -Shekinah