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When I saw her coming thus, her hands full of ears of grain...
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The silence of the fields. How everything gradually falls silent as night descends. How everything then seems to gather inward: men and animals through an effect of the universal silence; plants and everything that is mobile, because the wind drops as evening approaches, and the air then ordinarily has only a very light breath.
It is this stillness of all things, and because the remnants of light are reflected more at these tranquil hours by earth and rocks than by trees and plants, that the hills and fields seem, so to speak, to raise the earth and be astonished.
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Sad harvests...
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Why morning is laughing.
Wednesday, July 4, 1787.
On that day I saw for the first time the Theodosian map called Conrad Peutinger’s.
July 14, 1787.
The essential thing is not that a work contain many truths, but that no truth be injured in it.
July 23, 1787.
There is not in the ancients a single example of a discourse suspended by anyone other than the speaker himself. That is, one does find in them those reticences we have regarded as a beauty, but none of those interruptions caused by one interlocutor taking the floor from a previous interlocutor; interruptions that we designate by dots.
It is because they did not have, as we do, that thoughtlessness and vivacity that lead us to snatch the floor from one another: a thing common in our ways of life, but unheard of among them, who, tranquil and calm as savages, always waited their turn patiently and would, so to speak, have thought they were offending the god of speech if they had not allowed a discourse to reach its end and attain its perfection.
(At least in public discourses. For in their conversations they may sometimes have interrupted one another; and the word excepit, which they sometimes use in place of tum ille, seems to indicate a rejoinder lively enough to be regarded as an interruption. Yet I believe this word expresses only a prompt reply that closely follows the end of another discourse. A noteworthy circumstance among them, where some interval elapsed between one discourse and another. The one replying meditated for a time and prepared himself, as savages still do. Thus Homer’s long verses — tum allocutus est pedibus velox Achilles — which separate one harangue from another by the whole interval of a hexameter, are a faithful image of what was observed in their assemblies.)
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— You will reap the wheat they sow. — Thus speaks the conqueror.
July 26, 1787.
Sometimes the ancients — for example, when they represented a man walking — painted the man badly. They neglected the accuracy and elegance of the drawing that represented the figure. But then at least they expressed his action exactly. One or two bold and characteristic strokes traced its kind perfectly. They made shapeless legs; but they walked admirably, and perhaps that is enough.
September 16, 1787.
Strongholds were then what strongboxes are today. When a lord had put his men safely behind strong walls, he had enclosed all his riches there.
September 20, 1787.
... Flatter the ear? It must always be moved, but not always flattered.
November 11, 1787.
... It is like a song. One remembers the air without remembering the words.
Non canimus surdis, respondent omnia sylvae. — We have echoes; these forests are full of them. (Virgil.) This verse is indeed an invitation to song.