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June 3.
Of the immortals. There everything will be purified by repentance or made more perfect by admiration.
Of those who, incapable of feeling these enjoyments or these privations, will have neither these goods nor these evils as their lot.
See what human justice does. It destroys what cannot be amended and inflicts only shame upon those whom shame can correct.
June 4.
He said: — Take care not to treat as disputed what ought to be regarded as indisputable. Do not place under the jurisdiction of reasoning what belongs to the province of inner sense; set forth and do not prove the truths of feeling.
He also said: — There is danger in proofs. In arguing, one must suppose what is in question to be problematic. What one becomes accustomed to supposing problematic ends by seeming doubtful.
All possible proofs of a real fact are less certain than the fact. Finally he said: — In what is visible and palpable, never prove what is believed. In what is certain and hidden by its greatness and its nature, make people believe and do not prove. In what is practice and duty, command and do not explain. Fear God has made men pious. Proofs of God’s existence have made many men atheists.
Every petty pleader makes people quarrelsome, and one almost always passes from the desire to contradict the doctor to the desire to contradict the doctrine. The weapons with which (the audacity with which) one defends truth provoke an opposing audacity. Her champions’ bravado has made her many enemies. Challenges give rise to attack. Adorn her and do not arm her: far less war will be made upon her.
Conviction is for the mind a kind of torture from which it escapes by confession. Duped by its own pain, it escapes by believing what it does not believe. The art of convincing (of which I have seen men so proud), employed upon simple men, is no more marvelous than the art of squeezing a child’s thumbs. With a clever man, it is merely the art of the retiarius among gladiators. In daily practice, when one uses it imperiously, proudly, and in earnest, that is, by forcing others to conform their actions, tastes, speech, and life to it, it is truly the art of a torturer, the art of Bronte the torturer.
June 20.
The only beautiful works are those that have long been (if not worked on, at least) dreamed.
June 26.
To hide one’s eyes to make people believe one is hiding one’s tears.
Men irritated with one another place time or space between them. Space if they can flee from each other, and time (if they inhabit the same place) by not thinking of each other, by forgetting each other, by letting hours pass without being occupied with each other.
June 19.
Truth. They make it consist in saying nothing they cannot prove. The greatest happiness they find in it is being able to advance indisputable assertions. They love and regard it as a preeminence, a prerogative, a power, a dignity, etc., a freedom from error.
Truth is not that. Truth consists in having, about anything whatever, an opinion like the thought of God himself. The happiness it brings us is to be like God himself in this respect. It gives us pleasure through the gentle and diffused clarity with which it intimately penetrates all our faculties. To the feeling of clarity it gives us is joined that of a warmth by which the whole soul is secretly and delightfully and peacefully stirred. That is its character. Certainty itself does not have it.
Note. If truth consists in having about anything whatever an opinion like the thought of God himself (that is, the thought God himself has of that thing), it follows... etc.
June 22.
These abrupt and rapid narratives. As they carry me along, they jolt me.
Men born loving, in whom no love can arise or subsist except through admiration, bear a heart that can be wholly occupied only by God himself. They were born for devotion.
Writers who have influence are only men who perfectly express what others think, and awaken in minds ideas or feelings that were tending to blossom.
Saturday, May 5.
Elephant. Leftover matter. Scrapings of bread dough. To use it all, one makes a mass of it, a great cake.
Horses. Of two horses harnessed to the same chariot, there is always one weaker or gentler that yields to the other’s movements, accommodates itself to them, responds to them, seconds them, and follows them. Without this there is no good team.
June 1.
There we shall all have the same knowledge or the same ignorances. Consequently nothing will be able to disunite us. No diversity of feelings or opinions will engender differences, disputes, dissensions. You know what Plato said.
June 27.
Illusion. God created it and placed it between grains, fruits, meats, and the palate of the mouth, and from it flavors were born; between flowers and the sense of smell, and from it fragrances were born; between hearing and sounds, and from it harmony, melody, etc., were born; between the eyes and objects, and from it colors, perspective, and beauty were born.
It is a little of nature amusing itself by giving us some pleasure through some evaporation.
It differs from error. If I see colors without seeing any object, as in the air, for example, I am in error. In the contrary case I am in illusion and truth.
Every illusion is produced by some emanation and is the effect of a cloud, a vapor, the intervention of a fluid. If the organ is impaired, if the object is ill disposed or altered in its constituent parts, there is no illusion. One of the two parties then fails to furnish the stake, and the game of illusion can no longer take place.
Illusions. They can therefore be produced only by these effluvia, these invisible outflows, these subtle emanations that maintain perpetual currents between different beings. These beings cannot, then, give and receive agreeable sensations unless some loss of substance takes place somewhere. Thus the good of inspiring and feeling pleasure is bound to the condition of changing and wasting away.