January 16.

Our eye prevents us from seeing: it is our body that prevents us from touching. Between us and truth are our senses, which bring a part of it into us, but also separate us from it. This separation, necessary for the soul to form itself, is felt by it, etc.

January 17.

Bright shadows, or images, issue from us, as do dark shadows, or shadows properly so called.

There is something luminous in the face that is not found in the other parts of the body.

January 19.

All time is the distance that separates two movements.

Instruments of God’s designs, we carry them out blindly, unawares and despite ourselves. But we obey his commandments only freely, and do his will only through our own.

January 18.

To know whether no man (and perhaps no animal) dies without the sum of good things for him having equaled the sum of bad things, just as no year passes for any point on this globe without light and shadow having been distributed to it in equal number, in an allotment more or less regular and more or less marked, but always the same in its result. Can one know this? One cannot, but only etc. (Thus those who live in the snows of the pole and those who dwell under the equator have both had six months of day and six months of night by the year’s end.)

January 20.

Each man thinks, not what he has been told, but what he has understood.

... They would rather be given it to believe than to understand.

Speech, indeed, is only thought embodied.

It is impossible to operate (to proceed) in metaphysics otherwise than the Platonists have done. And it is better to speak of their ideas with understanding than with contempt.

One must also admit that Platonism is beautiful only in Plato.

These ideas are so natural to the human mind that it has them everywhere.

To whom are you speaking? to philosophers? they have no need of what you say. The others will not understand you. You can do harm and cannot be of use.

They have carried the ardors and transports of vehement eloquence even into cold erudition.