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The Chinese have very well observed that when action is needed, we ordinarily err more by deficiency than by excess, and when speech is needed, the reverse is true. Let us say, then: if you must act, spend yourself freely; if you must speak, spare yourself. In acting, fear laziness, and in speaking, fear abundance, ardor, volubility. (One must speak with measure, act with vivacity.)
Whoever blushes is beginning to correct himself.
Your mind is an elephant in strength, in size, in power, in measure, and in dignity, and you want to make it a fly.
April 30.
That the happiness of wisdom is repose in light. — And the happiness of virtue is repose in the bosom of order.
May 2.
M. de C. was not skillful. He never knew how to impress rogues enough to earn their esteem.
May 12.
Wisdom is thus a mixture of order and truth: but in such a way that through it we are still more within order than within truth.
May 13.
To be within order, or in one’s place. Truth is in perspective. We see her as beautiful only from home, from our own window. That is, by keeping our mind in the disposition and at the fixed point where it ought to be. Perspective presupposes distance. Too much closeness does harm. (The children who run from summit to summit to catch the moon. She is made to be seen, not to be touched.)
May 29.
To Mme de B. Dreams — and repose in the —
May 19.
To be true is to show oneself as one is and to be as nature had made us.
Reasoning is good only in matters where we cannot see a thing. It is the very staff of the blind.
May 26.
On things that can be judged only with the moral sense; and on the abuse of judging moral things with the physical sense. One must judge moral things with the moral sense and physical things with the physical sense. (N. B. the political sense.)
May 29.
That, strictly speaking, there is no substance but spirit; that earthly appearance is accident; that what is born at the point of contact between the various things and ourselves (that is, sensations, ideas, play or illusion) is not only real, like the fire that springs from the meeting of a hard body and flint, but is also a final reality, for whose sake palpable realities exist; that the most incomplete of all philosophical calculations is the one that considers such a quantity merely an insignificant, accidental zero.