Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Joubert

Profundity has always been an easy costume to rent, and Joubert is yanking at the seams. His jab is aimed at the kind of writer (and thinker, and public speaker) who climbs into abstraction not because the idea demands it, but because vagueness confers status. “Make themselves abstract” is the tell: this isn’t about difficult subjects; it’s about self-fashioning. The person is performing depth by dissolving into cloudy nouns, turning a personality into a fog machine.

The line works because it turns abstraction from a neutral tool into a moral maneuver. Abstract terms aren’t condemned outright; Joubert concedes their “useful part,” then delivers the blade: their usefulness is often like the usefulness of darkness. “Shadows” suggests theatrics and concealment, the stagecraft of the intellectual. A shadow makes something look larger and more dramatic than it is, and it also blocks inspection. The “vacuum” beneath is brutal: not merely error, but absence, the void where an argument or experience should be.

Context sharpens the critique. Joubert, a moralist and aphorist writing in post-Enlightenment France, lived amid a culture intoxicated by systems and grand conceptual vocabularies. After the Revolution, language itself had been weaponized and inflated; big words could justify big violences or big reputations. His warning feels like an early diagnosis of a recurring modern illness: when language stops pointing to reality and starts protecting the speaker. The subtext is almost journalistic in its demand: show your work. If you can’t name the thing plainly, maybe you don’t have the thing at all.