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December 22.
He willed... that no book could suffice us... not even the best of all...
— who preside over the dream of the waking man.
December 23.
Souls of water, souls of earth, souls of air, souls of fire.
— and love us infinitely, since you are infinite.
He who has such love and attention for visible order that he cannot encounter anything palpable out of place or out of shape without straightening or arranging it, and he who has such discernment of moral order and such determination to restore or maintain it that he cannot approach someone afflicted without offering consolation, someone needy without being moved to help... The first has a good eye, and the other a clear imagination. Both see rightly. One has geometric exactness, the other moral exactness, a quality far more useful, and even far more transcendent and far more extensive than the first, for it embraces more objects, and less apparent objects, and more important objects, with the same exactness.
In language there must be great care, great choice, and great abundance.
Bourdaloue. There is in him neither perfect precision nor volubility. He has virtuosified the passions.
Newton. It is no more true that he discovered the system of the world than it is true that the man who made a fair copy of the administration’s accounts discovered a system of government.
December 25.
Fine clothes are a sign of joy.
December 26.
Ancient languages are suited to translating ancient languages, and modern ones modern ones. (It is because peoples of the same time have the same spirit more than others do.)
December 27.
The first laws were only the first practices made unchangeable by the injunction of public authority. The first legislators did no more than reduce to regulations or ordinances what they had seen established at home or elsewhere, as Lycurgus reduced to laws at Sparta what was practiced in Crete. All these so-famous legislations cost those whose names they bear only the trouble and care of choosing, correcting, adapting, drafting. Everything that became law, in a word, had first been custom; and the history of our customary law was that of the law of all peoples. Solon’s laws were made as the custom of Sens was.
Laws made in this way are not the worst, nor is the mind that chooses, adapts, corrects, and drafts with perfection the least.
That the ancient legislators were sages and were not inventors.
Every nature has its sphere, from which it cannot depart, and its measure, which it cannot exceed. There is no century, year, month, day, or moment in which there is not, in every nature, an individual who fills its sphere and reaches its measure, in the whole height of the one and the whole space of the other.
December 28.
The heavens of the heavens, the heaven of heaven.