To announce to them the great divisions of the day and the hours favorable for rising, for work, for rest, for returning, for sleeping: necessary, daily things whose moment we shall make as nearly as possible common to all our inhabitants, so that they lead a similar life mingled with similar moments of toil and joy, waking, falling asleep, acting, and stopping more or less all together.

December 24, 1791.

There are objections that reveal less the fault of an exposition than the faults of the listener. They come not from the obscurity of the subject but [from] the obscurity of the mind considering it, or from its slowness or its haste or its inattention, etc.

If I delight in contemplating the ocean, I delight still more in contemplating the Mediterranean, a sea known, opened, and traveled longer ago; a sea sailed by every ancient and celebrated navy. There sailed the Phocaeans, the Phoenicians, the fleet of Xerxes, and that of the Athenians.

There are no invisible, impalpable beings, inaccessible to touch: that is what atheism says.

Plato. — Before answering me, become gentler and better.

Plato. — These invisible beings have movement, life, and thought, will, passion, etc. They lack only blood, nerves, etc.

Plato. — The faculty of moving oneself is a sign of inward movement, of life, thought, and will.

Plato. — The legislator is not permitted to be ignorant of divine things.

Plato calls king anyone capable, through his ascendancy and understanding, of ruling and guiding men.

The law (he says) is then like an inflexible, stubborn man.

First make customs instead of making laws.

Plato. — Every government is, of itself, a lasting and robust thing.

Plato. — Music and the arts express only simulacra. (He is right.)

Note. — A sentence has number when its parts can be counted (that is, when it has distinct, varied parts that can be counted), rhythm when one can beat or mark its measure with a gesture, with the voice.

December 25, 1791.

Plato. — In marriages as in magistracies, the modest must be joined with the strong, the lively with the indolent, the bold with the prudent, etc.: in a word, those suited to action and those suited to thought, etc.

— Note. It takes as long to read an abbreviation as to read a word written out in full. For it is the mind that reads and sees during reading, and not the eyes alone.

Plato. — Water seeks to coagulate everything, and fire to divide everything.

The One (says Plato) is the principle of things. It is everything that is not itself.

Void below and solid above; that jars.

Plato. — Parmenides was beautiful — and Zeno was tall.

The one is one; the other is not many.

Plato. — Existing beings are only copies of ideas, which are more existent than they.