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February 10.
Of politics. Its principles, its rules, its axioms. — To treat it as one treats ethics.
February 11.
The B[ible] is the history of God.
February 12.
The high road of human life, which is: to be born and, while growing up, to live subject to one’s parents’ will; to marry and to found, govern, and provision one’s household, family, and circle for the present and the future; to die hoping for a better life.
One must provision one’s household with necessities, one’s family with good precepts and good examples, one’s friends with good memories.
One founds a household, a family, and one’s circle by instilling sound principles of probity and prosperity in everyone connected with us. One governs by assiduously subjecting all who depend on us to the rule one follows oneself. One provisions, etc.
People who are too sensitive often make themselves very pitiable by persuading themselves that there is only one way for them to be happy, whereas, if they would take the trouble to look, they would find fifty that would serve them just as well.
February 14.
The uneven course of the spirits...
My son, have the soul of an R — and the hands of a wise steward.
February 18.
When this idea presents itself to the mind with some vividness, when this feeling touches the heart for a single instant, everything falls into order around them.
Buffon. — There is no great bombast of words in him, but there is great bombast of thoughts.
February 19.
Strength that attacks [strength] is boldness. Strength that attacks weakness is cowardice.
February 20.
Of the little that produces great pains as well as great pleasures, all of which (to say it in passing) have something local about them.
That what is most attenuated and least abundant in our humors is their cause, and what is least intense and least extensive in our solids is their seat. The movement of a vapor, the trembling of a fibril produce what men fear more than death and what they love more than life.
February 21.
That the world is enchanted.
One must say what one thinks to be content with oneself and with what one says. But to be eloquent, fertile, varied, abundant, and, in a word, an orator, it is enough—and perhaps necessary—to have nothing to say but what one thinks by halves, vaguely, only lately, and at the very moment one speaks. For the warmth of thoughts comes from their novelty; their abundance comes from the very indecisions of the mind. The wise man (that is, one who brings into full daylight only what he has ripened), the wise man, I say, may be eloquent as an oracle, but he will never be fluent as Cicero. To make fine speeches of this kind with ease, one must do to oneself what one wishes to do to one’s listener—that is, persuade oneself of the truth of what one says as one speaks.
He has hung the universe with tapestries. But these colors, these figures, these imaginings, and all these varied ornaments that enchant our eyes—he has not placed them on walls, on floors, on ceilings, like our earthly workmen; he has placed them in our mind. And, my dear, what would you say of a painter who, instead of setting his pictures on canvas, imprinted them in the very imagination of those who looked at that canvas, and who colored the mind. — ?