Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.
— leave life as Black people carried away as slaves leave their country, without any idea of the country to which they are going.
...to die living, that is, filled with the projects of life. One must die dying.
She did not even have time to arrange her clothes before falling. — However much one expects it, the blow of reality always takes one by surprise.
April 21.
Those square sentences and thoughts, each of whose angles enters the mind as a wedge enters wood, as a dart enters flesh. Style must penetrate through pleasure, not through the force of the throw or the arrow’s point, which must nevertheless not be neglected. Both must be strong and rounded like the globules of sound.
April 24.
If there is a useful way and a useless way of considering every question, an obscure way and a clear way of treating it, a possible means and an impossible one of conceiving truths, why prefer the useless to the useful, the obscure to what is clear, and the impossible to the possible? Yet this is what our mind does every day.
April 25.
Homer called ingeniorum fontem by the Latins. That ocean of poetry. Aristotle is an ocean of intelligence. Source of knowledge.
Aristotelès. From him, as from a spring, knowledge flowed into the centuries that followed him. If all books were lost and his remained to us, we could recover all the sciences, all the arts. Nothing, strictly speaking, would be lost, except Plato, a few poets, and a few orators.
Suppositions need not be proved when they are offered only for clarity.
Spirits. Almost the only things that exist. Matter is employed only to give them a covering. It is a mere effigy; its weight, its intensity are almost nothing but an appearance. And yet we speak of mass, of enormous thicknesses and weights. This is because we ourselves are inexpressibly light in matter. A speck of straw in the eye seems as hard as a pebble. This is because our eye is tender. A straw on the pupil has the powers of a beam. A hand before our sight obscures it like a mountain. This is because the visual orbit is a point of extreme delicacy.
Distances masses, etc., that frighten the imagination. Say: that frighten calculation, for the imagination does not conceive the universe at all as you make it.
May 4.
To know how many millions of leagues from the earth the sun is placed. Is a most useless number to know, for it serves absolutely no purpose. But to know that this distance could be measured, and how it was measured, is not useless. The fact is nothing, but its discovery is beautiful. I mean that the ingenuity used to make it deserves esteem and can be usefully applied to other, more profitable measurements.
Clocks should regulate watches, as laws should regulate individual actions. But the sun must regulate clocks, and justice must regulate laws.
How ignorance is a bond among people. Politics must make use of it.
Modern physics, proud of its useless things. It is easy to know and impossible to understand.
This so-called natural history is only the history of aviaries, hunts, menageries, and chemical cabinets.