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In religion, in ethics, as in politics, there are things whose care must absolutely be left to omnipotence alone. Many abuses are of this kind, and every doctrine should mark them out, distinguish them.
January 28.
Birds were given their large feathers against the rain, their small ones for warmth; down serves them as a tunic, the rest serves them as a cloak.
Mysteries, — or religious secrets...
There, matter ceases.
Those who expend much coarse humor and little subtle humor (spirit) need only coarse foods to restore them. The others, on the contrary. (Of labors and foods, of excretions and secretions). To replenish the superfluous, the useless is in some sense enough. Someone who dissipates and loses a portion of his essential substance needs something that supplies it.
January 31.
The Vestal, sculpted only down to the waist: the rest is stone.
What communicates itself. — That the warmth of enthusiasm is indispensable to every lesson with which one wishes children’s souls to be penetrated. A teacher must have something of what communicates itself.
Memory and coldness. That memory is attached to the soul only insofar as it becomes what we call imagination.
To warm oneself in the sun of idleness...
Of law and truth. — Truth is the conformity of what is said with the reality of hidden things. Law is the conformity of what is prescribed with the interests of social order and the existence of universal order. Law is the declaration of what the establishment, maintenance, and perfection of order require.
— Might it not be possible that part of his immutability consists in being immutably changed, appeased, etc. by the prayers of the innocent?
The passions are only nature. It is non-repentance that is corruption.
February 6.
Those people lack a knowledge, an entire class of affections and thoughts, a step of the great staircase, a link in the immense chain, a quarter of the circle, a third of the order, the better half of the whole, knowledge of the pivot on which the machine turns.
February 8.
Of the ages of life. — That there are some in which nature leads us out of wisdom. Then our only remaining ties to it are memories and resolutions that bring us back to it in the end.
February 9.
That there was then no one left in any body who knew how to govern.