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November 25.
Faculty of inventing languages — is a skill natural to our intelligence.
In the end, God loves each man as much as he loves the whole human race. Weight and number are nothing in his eyes. Eternal, immense, infinite, he has only immense loves.
November 27.
God shone upon him. (Forgotten.)
November 29.
Condillac. This man is full of half-truths, so that the mind has the power neither to withhold all its attention from him nor to grant him all of it. This is what makes him tedious, tiring and, to say it all, disagreeable. In reading him one feels a sort of uneasiness and, so to speak, a pulling in different directions; with him, thought is perpetually in a false position. (Half-truths, halves of windows.)
December 3.
Let us make M. Bonald’s assertion more general and say: Every material people will sooner or later be subjected by a moral people.
This tedious question of perfectibility ought to be reduced to these terms: 1st, has human perfection (as we can conceive it and are inclined to desire it) existed in any man, yes or no? 2nd, does it exist or has it existed in as many men as possible? An affirmative answer to the first part and a negative answer to the second would certainly accord with most men’s ideas, but the partisans of perfectibility do not concede the first and think that human nature itself is only at the first point of its development — and that with time and books like theirs, the smallest men will be able to stand 20 feet tall, the weakest to live 100 years, and the stupidest to have wit like Voltaire.
Does talent, then, need passions? Yes, it needs many restrained passions.
To atone for dreams.
Religion. It brings happiness to the wise, and happiness to the senseless. (The pleasures of the sick man.)
December […]5.
On religious genius: a kind of poetic genius.
Newton. He was endowed with the ease of knowing the how much in all things.
December […]7.
They need a body, but they do not need senses.