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[LaHarpe.] ... That is very well said. “Withering colors!” That is beautiful. Yet it was La Harpe who said it. But...
Every critic by profession, a mediocre man by nature.
December 17.
That it is always by going beyond and not by staying this side that all languages are corrupted. By going beyond the noise of their ordinary sound, their natural energy, their usual brilliance, etc. It is clamor that accompanies their decline and luxury that corrupts them.
A man who knows how to paint, even a man who knows how to speak. That alone is a marvel in itself. But that alone is not enough for the approval of the skilled. What one says and what one paints must, in addition, be truly beautiful.
December 20.
We will use terms suited to sustaining attention, encouraging our efforts, showing the goal clearly.
December […]2.
Logic, which is a kind of grammar whose relation is to ideas. (In ordinary grammar the relation is to words.)
It is luxury that ruins languages, sciences, etc. I mean the luxury peculiar to each of these kinds of things.
Locke treated metaphysics as Fontenelle treated poetry, and he was a metaphysician as Lamotte and Fontenelle were poets. — And Condillac is in metaphysics what the abbé Terrasson, who wrote Sethos, is in poetry. — Clarke: a kind of logical geometry in which everything is conducted by the force of figures or reasoning, etc. Relation to the geometry of the blind.
Lines of verse made with reflection and by the sole effect of a cold combination.
All excellent lines of verse are like impromptus made at leisure. They come from the bosom of a peaceful reverie, but they come from it all at once.
December 24.
M. de Chomorceau.
The priest being, then, a necessary authority in the state, one must defer to what he teaches and hold it true without examination, as one defers to the praetor’s sentence, executing it as just, whatever it may be.
As for truth etc. — the predecessors who introduced etc. or the government etc. has judged it sufficiently.
December 25.
Immortality of the soul. A necessary opinion, not only to console but to teach justice.
December 27.
We are all old children, more or less grave, more or less full of ourselves.