Believe that experience of many opinions gives the mind that has held them great flexibility and at the same time strengthens it in those it believes the best.

Religion forbids belief, in matters that concern it, in anything it does not teach.

Mr. de Bonald. He seems to me to have more austerity in his mind than in his tastes. Moreover, endowed with a patience equal to his vivacity, he has much of the one and also much of the other.

— and of those opinions one can hold coolly and without furrowing one’s brow.

January 20.

The shadow of smoke, in the sun. — 21: in the mirror.

January 21.

And at this age of passions, one feels one’s body so strongly that...

January 23.

(In the little wood.) The mosses are beginning to grow.

January 27.

All beings come from little, and they fall only a little short of coming from nothing.

January […].

That: sentences and words must be suited to the voice, the voice to the place, and that words suited to being heard from afar, sentences suited to those words, are ridiculous when one should speak only to the eyes and, so to speak, into the ear of one’s reader.

January […].

There is a production, that of thoughts. And nature has four kingdoms (instead of three); the one neglected today is the intellectual kingdom.

You say that books are soon read, but they are not soon understood. To digest them, etc. To understand a beautiful and great thought well may take as much time as to have it, to conceive it. To become imbued with it or to produce it are almost one and the same action.

Perfection. The poet finds it in Homer, the sculptor in the antiques, the philosopher in Plato (if he can understand him), the moralist in Socrates, and the Christian in Jesus Christ. Our condition is therefore confined to filling out the dimensions our sketch can attain.

As for the sciences, their perfection does not come from man’s, but from the number of discoveries chance places before his eyes.