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June 22.
Sometimes the vague word is preferable to the precise term. There are (in Boileau’s expression) elegant obscurities; there are majestic ones. There are necessary ones: those that make the mind imagine what clarity could not make it see.
June 24.
Grenades and drumsticks of honor devised by Bonaparte, excellent moral currency. In what way preferable to the ill-conceived columns. Few among the strong have an imagination that reaches high and far. They need glories close at hand and prizes they wear on themselves, that touch them, distinguish them, and adorn them; a glory that leaps to the eye, so to speak, and is incorporated with them. Award honors to the leaders, but clothe the soldiers in them.
June 25.
Religion: a remedy. And if it cures, what does it matter where it comes from or what it is made of.
Politeness is the art of being bored without boredom or (if you prefer) of enduring boredom without being bored.
June 28.
One day we may have better lights, but shall we have better eyes? That is what this whole question of the perfectibility attributed to the human species comes down to. Now our telescopes have not lengthened our sight. Even our compass has not increased our knowledge, but has given us a means of doing without it.
June 29.
They said of metaphysics that it is the science to which God applies himself and which he knows perfectly. It is in this sense that they called it divine.
To group. The art of grouping. The art of grouping one’s words and thoughts. Then the thought, the sentence, and the period must frame themselves by their own form, subsist by their own mass, carry themselves by their own weight.
Labruyère (Boileau used to say) had spared himself the trouble of transitions. He had given himself [another]: [that] of grouping.
For a transition, a single relation suffices. But for aggregation a thousand are needed, for there must be an entire, natural, unique congruity.
June 30, at 9 a.m.
That light has warmth of its own, and darkness coolness.
Reason and religion are so mingled in our books that, if you proscribe those that deal with dogma, you will forbid those that deal with morals.
To exclude the young from metaphysics, for their thoughts come to them from themselves.
When we call death to our aid, it is so that she may help us carry our bundle of sticks. Descartes himself uses this allusion to the fable of the woodcutter and death.
I have said that laughter and sneezing probably come about through the same physical cause and the working of the same mechanism. Indeed, both occur in jolts and with similar shakings, though there is a difference.