April 12.

Aristotle’s errors in anatomy scarcely deserve the name of errors. They may be defined as mere transpositions of facts. He has no false idea, but he was mistaken in sometimes attributing to one part prerogatives that have been recognized as belonging to another, such as the origin of the nerves, etc. He knew nature well; he attributed to it no economy or springs other than its own. But he was slightly mistaken about some of their distributions. Whoever knows well what he said needs only to be warned to watch for these displacements to know everything better than others. In his excellent books one ought to make errata of doctrine as one makes errata of printing. The corrections of this kind that one might make to Aristotle would perhaps not occupy half a leaf.

It is not authors’ opinions and the part of their doctrine that may be called assertions that most instruct and nourish the mind. Apart from these parts, solid and palpable in a sense, there is in reading great writers an invisible and hidden juice, a salt, a subtle principle, and I know not what elusive fluid, more nourishing than all the rest.

Thales called the soul a magnet. He would have spoken better had he called the magnet the soul of iron.

Desprez has his judgment full of blisters.

April 13.

Every work must be a clear riddle whose last word is the answer. Coarseness of style consists in saying everything bluntly at the outset.

April 14.

There must be no wit in prayer. Religion excludes it. Do you not say that wit consists in perceiving and setting forth subtle and new relations between known things, that is, earthly things, and in showing oneself original? Now, how can one use these relations and this originality in a thing whose essence consists in forgetting the earth and annihilating in oneself what constitutes our singularities, to keep only one’s nature and consider only its master, its author, the creator. The perfection of prayers will therefore consist in being empty of all wit and yet full of sense.

April 15.

Ah! how could she not be immortal? She is divine. Do you not call her a “ray of the supreme intelligence”? Even those that need to be re-formed, having received some first form, however imperfect, eternally retain some modification from it that no longer allows them to rejoin and merge with their principle, as a wandering flame, in going out before the eyes, sinks back into union with the principle of fire.

April 17.

Novels should be for the young like accounts fitted to acquaint them with the country of life into which they are going.

What is so finished, so exact in expression, and, in a word, so perfect has a kind of form so determinate and solid that the reader’s imagination, having nothing to do in it and no influence to exert on it, does not open itself to it as memory does, to make it its own and retain it. One leaves this memoir before oneself to admire, but outside oneself. One is struck by it, not penetrated. There is nothing fluid or supple there, unless the thought itself has such ethereality that it dematerializes the words.

Add: what is perfect, so finished, stays in the memory and gets little rereading. (How to unite these two merits?)

Note. — It moves the mind, but does not make the mind move itself. These springs render our own useless to us.

What is called unction of style always presupposes a certain fluidity in it, an oily lack of solidity.

Like those young people who seek to judge instead of seeking to understand.

April 20.

Piety. The only means of escaping the dryness that the labor of reflection inevitably brings to the sources of our sensibilities.

April 23.

Gestures and postures that not only “incline the machine toward respect,” in Paschal’s phrase, but also incline the mind toward piety, which is an annihilation of the self.