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October 30.
The shadow of a shadow: the abstraction of an abstraction.
They forge the sciences, laborious, ardent, tireless, industrious cyclopes, who have only one eye.
October 31.
Delille. These are Ovid’s Georgics.
November 1.
The physical sciences yield their fruit.
November 2.
To animate flour. Yeast is indeed an animation, a life, a spirit, a soul introduced into dough.
It is through imagination that one is a metaphysician.
November […].
Must one tell the truth? — Yes, but the truth that is permitted, for if etc.
Must one practice thrift? — Yes, but not at the expense of all generosity either.
November […]7.
On the need for beauty, — natural to certain minds and become, as it were, natural to certain others. Faults of style it causes.
This need for beauty gives above all the habit, and almost the necessity, of putting much art and strength into expression when the thought or subject has no merit of its own to make it stand out. With this character and this turn of mind, one can write simply, naturally, only when one has thoughts that are beautiful in themselves. Let us wait for them, then.
November 9, 1800. (18 brum.)
Sometimes one learns more easily through combination than through division and simplicity. Thus a medal, imprinting the name of a city on the memory, makes it easier for a child to retain the name of a province, and, starting there as from a known point, he more easily gets the whole universe into his head, step by step. History and numismatics make the study of geography less laborious, although in this case it seems more complicated. But this is because the apparent complication is then in fact only a combination or juxtaposition of real simplicities, each of which offers the mind a step, a rung, a branch, with whose help it arrives by leaping and playing. Your exact and rigorous analysis is thus often, and in a certain sense, more a means of not knowing than a means of learning.
On words that occupy attention so completely that they turn it away from thought. (Vid. supra.) These astonishing, dazzling, striking words are also sometimes the only means one has of making thought perceptible. It can manifest itself only through them. They are especially fit (and they alone are) they alone are fit to manifest the attitudes and movements of the mind, operations as pleasant and as useful and as important to know as the thoughts themselves.
November 11.
To know is to see within oneself.
November 12.
To think about thought and reason about reasoning, there is their art and their occupation.