"Never cut what you can untie"
About this Quote
A small domestic image with a surprisingly radical politics: don’t reach for the blade when patience and attention will do. Joubert’s line flatters the reader into a better version of themselves - someone with enough restraint to solve a problem without violence, enough humility to assume the knot might have a logic. The verb choice matters. “Cut” is final, clean, impatient; it wins quickly and leaves less to work with afterward. “Untie” is slower, tactile, a negotiation with complexity. One is dominance. The other is understanding.
The intent isn’t just self-help prudence; it’s an ethics of method. Joubert, a moralist in the French tradition, wrote in fragments aimed at character formation rather than system-building. Read against the late Enlightenment and post-Revolutionary French mood, the maxim lands as a rebuke to the era’s appetite for decisive, irreversible solutions - political purges, ideological “clean cuts,” the fantasy that you can simplify society by severing what annoys you. Cutting is what you do when you want the problem gone more than you want the world intact.
Subtext: impatience often masquerades as courage. People cut because they’re anxious, angry, or performing competence. Untying requires a different kind of bravery: staying with the mess, accepting the embarrassment of not knowing, risking that the solution will be incremental and unspectacular. The line works because it’s practical enough to apply to string, relationships, and institutions - and sharp enough to expose the moral vanity behind “just get rid of it.”
The intent isn’t just self-help prudence; it’s an ethics of method. Joubert, a moralist in the French tradition, wrote in fragments aimed at character formation rather than system-building. Read against the late Enlightenment and post-Revolutionary French mood, the maxim lands as a rebuke to the era’s appetite for decisive, irreversible solutions - political purges, ideological “clean cuts,” the fantasy that you can simplify society by severing what annoys you. Cutting is what you do when you want the problem gone more than you want the world intact.
Subtext: impatience often masquerades as courage. People cut because they’re anxious, angry, or performing competence. Untying requires a different kind of bravery: staying with the mess, accepting the embarrassment of not knowing, risking that the solution will be incremental and unspectacular. The line works because it’s practical enough to apply to string, relationships, and institutions - and sharp enough to expose the moral vanity behind “just get rid of it.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to Joseph Joubert; listed on Wikiquote (Joseph Joubert page). |
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