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February 2.
Dream. Memory lost.
February 3.
The self-judgment of authors (fallen or) ill slanders their talent. Then they feel their weakness; but they do not feel their strength, etc.
February 4.
There are times when one loves the lesser ones; there are times when one loves even the worst. Bossuet and Fénelon, Corneille and Racine, Voltaire and Rousseau.
Through politeness, from the first encounter, men who have not yet had time to know whether they have merit begin by supposing it in one another, that is, by doing what can be most advantageous as well as most agreeable to them.
In the painter’s genius everything is art, but not everything is art in the writer’s genius. For the first has only a painter’s genius, but the second has a man’s genius. One must be a man of intelligence to be a good author, but to be a good painter that is not at all necessary.
Of all those lines of verse that were not born as if of themselves and did not issue (if one may put it so) from the bosom and flanks of reverie, one can say: Here are lines that had no mother,—prolem sine matre creatam. They all have something imperfect, unfinished about them in this way.
February […].
Voltaire and Rousseau: the bear and the ape in the intellectual kingdom.
Voltaire. He counterfeited (very well, indeed) good sense. And all his talent consisted in counterfeiting.
February […].
To Mme de B[eaumont]. Love and respect life, if not for its own sake, at least for your friends. Whatever state yours may be in, I will always prefer to know you occupied in spinning it than in unwinding it (or unpicking it).
Mr. de St-P[ierre]. — This obscure and crushed seed.
Lafontaine. The expression in these lines is imperfect, not very definite. But the poet’s disposition is strongly marked, and the work pleases through that. In the same way, the pronounced posture of a man dreaming pleases us without our knowing what he dreams of.
February […].
The only good systems are those that come into us despite ourselves, and the only excellent systematic minds are those that are so by nature, not their own, but that of the very things whose natural chain they discover despite themselves.
February […].
When I shine... I lose my oil.