Art & Creativity Quote by Joseph Joubert

Joubert is smuggling a radical standard for art into what sounds like gentle advice: if the work doesn’t exhilarate you, it shouldn’t exist. “Never” is the tell. This isn’t a productivity tip; it’s an ethic. He’s arguing that pleasure is not a guilty byproduct of writing but the engine of its legitimacy, a private thermostat that predicts the reader’s experience better than any external rulebook.

The second sentence makes the first feel less self-indulgent and more strategic. “Emotion is easily transferred” frames writing as contagion, not transmission of information. Joubert isn’t claiming readers will share your ideas; they’ll catch your temperature. The subtext is a warning about counterfeit prose: dutiful, careerist pages leak their dutifulness. A writer can’t launder boredom into significance through craft alone, because the affect rides along in rhythm, diction, what you choose to notice, what you skip. Pleasure, in this view, becomes a kind of quality control: it forces attention, specificity, risk.

Context matters. Joubert is a writer famous for fragments and notebooks, more a curator of thought than a producer of big public texts. That background clarifies the line’s insistence on interior stakes. He’s not talking about pleasing an audience or chasing applause; he’s talking about a writer’s private barometer in an era when “good taste” and moral instruction often policed literature. Joubert quietly flips the hierarchy: emotional truth first, decorum second. The line still stings because it challenges the prestige of suffering-as-seriousness. He suggests the reader can tell when you’re alive on the page, and when you’re merely being correct.