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There are only two kinds of beautiful words: those that have [a] great fullness of sound, of meaning, of soul, of warmth, and of life, and those that have a great transparency.
One has in the soul, but hardly puts into one’s life, what one puts into one’s writings.
April 22.
One would say our thoughts are like our flowers. Those that are single (in expression) carry their seed with them; the double ones, in richness, in pomp, charm the mind, it enjoys them, but they produce nothing.
Of double flowers and single flowers. Thoughts with double flowers.
Virgil’s “mala mentis gaudia” or Chateaubriand’s “guilty joys of the heart.” Sin, he says, etc.
Pascal. Altitude of this mind: one sees it behind his thought. His firmness. Exemption from every passion. It is above all this that makes him very imposing.
Plato. His questions sometimes have the shape of a corkscrew.
If I grow heavy, all is lost.
April 25.
Diderot. And of what is too strongly pronounced. The same effects, in this respect, in what is style and in what is articulation.
The “carte blanche” of which Diderot speaks (page 333 of volume 14 of his works. Salon of 1767.) This carte blanche, given to reason as to imagination by half-darkness.
Diderot. What he says (very thoughtlessly, in my view), “that a tyrant is more beautiful than a king, wicked gods than good gods,” etc. (page 262, salon of 1767.)
He takes movement for emotion.
April 17.
Chateaubriand. It is the style of the soliloquy.
And one would be tempted to say: There is his tic taking hold of him again.
Descriptive genre—a way of writing in which one describes everything one sees and everything one feels.
There is some t’-t-n [breast] in that brain.
One should have said that barbarism is composed of power and ignorance, of wealth and coarseness, of the elevation that comes from fortune to the baseness that belongs to morals, to first habits, to the man, etc.
April 18.
The artifice of this naturalness.
April 19.
—And the time to follow one’s views, instead of occupying oneself with judging oneself.