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September 26.
Illusion is in the world what metaphor is in our speech. We see, we feel, we believe only with the help of some appearance that shows a reality. “He spoke to them in parables,” and this is how God acts. Did we not say that here was the great poet?
When the image masks the object, when a shadow is made into a body, when the word debauches the mind by charming it, when the expression pleases so much that we no longer seek to pass beyond it and penetrate to the meaning, when the figure absorbs our whole attention in itself, we are stopped along the way. The road is taken for the lodging. A bad guide leads us.
September 29 (Saint Michael’s Day; the chestnuts.)
Let us remember that everything is double.
To raise children only for life.
The tacit or expressed preamble of every law is this: “It has seemed supremely just.” That of every decree is this other: “We have judged it necessary.”
October 4.
To have virtue is to know how to do good without inclination carrying us toward it, and to refrain from doing evil though passion pushes us toward it.
October 7.
One must entrust neither fire to children nor iron to the frenzied.
October 8.
If nature has not given people immutable ideas of the just and the unjust (the source of their dissensions), it is important for them to adopt like ones and to supplement [nature] with conventions.
October 10.
Just as bodies do not see spirits, but only all that is body, I also think that spirits do not see what is merely body and that they see all that is spirit.
Each soul serves another soul as a mirror in which to contemplate itself. For whatever takes in an image can serve to reflect it, and whatever sees represents.
“Look, I am your pupil.”
October 11.
Each grain of sand in the vault covering the ant’s dwelling performs the same office for it as each thread of the surrounding web performs for the spider at its center: their movements give them warning.
If our knowledge enters us through the senses and the body, it remains there only through the soul, which gathers it, retains it, uses it.
To know how to reason, one must remember, combine one’s ideas; and for that one must withdraw into oneself, close one’s eyes, one’s hearing, in the end detach oneself from the body and flee it, as Plato says.
Nota. Say “he is unbound,” instead of saying “he has lived.”
October 12.
Heads: gushing springs, or water pots, or pools, or mires.