Renan finds it ridiculous that Jesus believes in the omnipotence, even in material things, of Prayer and Faith.
The sacraments are instruments of these dynamics.
On the infamy of printing, a great obstacle to the development of the Beautiful.
A fine conspiracy to organise for the extermination of the Jewish race.
The Jews as Librarians and witnesses of the Redemption.
All the imbeciles of the Bourgeoisie who endlessly utter the words: immoral, immorality, morality in art, and other nonsense, remind me of Louise Villedieu, a five-franc whore, who, accompanying me once to the Louvre, where she had never been, began to blush, to cover her face, and, tugging at my sleeve at every moment, asked me, before the immortal statues and paintings, how such indecencies could be displayed in public.
The fig leaves of Monsieur Nieuwerkerke.
For the law of progress to exist, each person would have to want to create it; that is to say that, when all individuals apply themselves to making progress, then humanity will be progressing.
This hypothesis may serve to explain the identity of the two contradictory ideas, freedom and fate. — Not only will there be, in the case of progress, identity between freedom and fate, but this identity has always existed. This identity is history, the history of nations and individuals.
Sonnet to quote in My Heart Laid Bare. Also quote the poem about Roland.
Last night I dreamed that Philis had returned,
Beautiful as she was in the light of day,
And wished her ghost to make love once again,
And me, like Ixion, to embrace a cloud.
Her shade slips naked into my bed,
And says: “Dear Damon, here I am again;
I have only grown more beautiful in that sad place
Where fate has held me since I went away,
“I come to kiss the fairest of lovers again;
I come to die again in your embrace.”
Then, when this idol had deceived my passion,
She said to me: “Farewell! I go back to the dead.
As you have boasted of having ⟨fucked⟩ my body,
You may boast of having ⟨fucked⟩ my soul.”
Parnasse satyrique.
I think this sonnet is by Maynard. Malassis claims it is by Théophile.
Hygiene. Plans — The more one wills, the better one wills.
The more one works, the better one works and the more one wants to work.
The more one produces, the more fruitful one becomes.
After a bout of debauchery, one always feels more alone, more abandoned.
Mentally as well as physically, I have always felt the abyss—not only the abyss of sleep, but the abyss of action, of dreams, of memory, of desire, of regret, of remorse, of beauty, of number, etc...
I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I am always dizzy, and today, 23 January 1862, I received a strange warning: I felt the wind of imbecility’s wing pass over me.
Hygiene. Morals. — To Honfleur! As soon as possible, before sinking any lower.
How many presentiments and signs God has already sent that it is high time to act, to regard the present minute as the most important of all minutes, and to make my usual torment—that is, Work—my perpetual pleasure!
Hygiene. Conduct. Morals. — At every minute we are crushed by the idea and sensation of time. And there are only two ways to escape this nightmare, to forget it: pleasure and work. Pleasure wears us out. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
The more we use one of these means, the more repugnance the other inspires in us.
We can forget time only by using it.
Everything is done only little by little.
De Maistre and Edgar Poe taught me to reason.
The only long task is the one we dare not begin. It becomes a nightmare.
Hygiene. — By putting off what we have to do, we run the risk of never being able to do it. By failing to convert at once, we risk damnation.
To be cured of everything—poverty, illness and melancholy—nothing at all is lacking except a Taste for work.