Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.
January 9.
He is not mad, but he readily allows madness to stay a while in his brain when by chance it enters. Or better: no madness can pass through his head without stopping there a while. Thus in his style there is some flightiness, and little brain.
It is pleasant to have beautiful paintings of one’s own, because colors do not remain perfectly in the memory. In their harmony there is a charm for the eye and the mind of which recollection can represent to us only the impression. (at Mme L. B.’s painting.)
January 10.
Narrow? yes. That part of my head which is meant to receive things that are not clear is very narrow.
Those times when events have no known connection, have no proper extent, but are rapid, are sudden, and cross like lightning flashes, and chase one another like waves, give memory no hold and historians no good material. Their history cannot be clear. So a figure made entirely of points that cannot be counted and of lines that intertwine, whatever it may resemble, can only be the obscure image of an obscure object. Such times thus necessar[ily] err through the crowding, whence the confusion and fatigue.
Frederick II. This king without women will never be my hero.
Of paintings that teach one to paint. That R[acin]e teaches one to write.
...but in the end comes a year in which one grows old.
Yes, to create or to mold. One has only a mind that is nothing in itself if one can do neither. I am speaking of the author’s mind.
G[arat] does neither. He sews, he joins, he assembles. He is a tailor, a dressmaker.
I said it much better long ago: hard minds and cyclopes with an eye in the middle of the forehead.
Of the style that masks. (Pascal speaks of it, but that of his time was not like ours.) And that one must adorn and not mask.
January 11.
Forms of style. Which, good? All, provided they are employed with taste. There is a multitude of expressions that are faults in some writers and beauties in others.
G[a]r[a]t. When this man wants to think, he first swells his mind, as others swell their voices when they want to speak.
Mr. de B. enlarged his as much as he could.
Montesquieu. Flowers suit his hands well. There are hands that wither them, like the hands of St. Francis of the [blank]. The Greek sophists have also dishonored them.
—and a youthfulness of mind...
—and I know not what sun that makes them spread their wings.
—and minds always in shadow.