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The vogue of books, the taste of centuries. Even what is ancient is subject to the changes of fashion. Corneille and Racine, Virgil and Lucan, Seneca and Cicero, Tacitus and Livy, Aristotle and Plato, have held the palm only by turns. What am I saying? in the same life according to our age, in the same year according to the seasons, and sometimes in the same day according to the hours, we prefer one book to another, one style to another style, one mind to another mind.
The advance of languages. There is a point. One does not go back once one has passed it. Minds that have experienced certain vivid impressions can no longer reproduce moderate ones. Of strongly muscled style. Of eminently molded sentences. Of the fixed, the determined. Of the finished. Of the last effort. That the perfection of art sets a limit to nature.
The mind opens with joy to all that resembles it. Make what you wish to teach it resemble the mind, then.
February […]9.
To know how to walk in the night, to have a goal, to reach it in obscurity, in darkness.
February 10.
That the history of our thoughts (despite us and without our knowledge) is found in our language. This expression of G.’s is very good, very exact, and the idea is very true.—Observation: G. did not use this expression. I was mistaken. He says only that language in general must be considered a monument of human reason.
February […]8.
Providence. Some are only her servants, but others are her ministers. These are those who, in carrying out her decrees, join their will with her will, their thought with her wisdom.
Newton’s idea. The soap bubble. The diamond.
Breath or animation. The nail or succrément.
Impenetrability can condense as a color can deepen.
Matter comes from his being. Movement comes from his will; his will, from his goodness.
The imprints of God.
Now we need to have recourse... = (Thursday, February 10) Let us mingle Aristotle with Plato, for everything serves and everything is needed = And our means of advancement will be drawn from reason.
(This is new. To press the point in the next notebook.)
Order, justice, or the coordination of the means with the goal, the parts with the whole, the whole with its destination, action with duty, the work with the model, lot with quality, reward with merit.
Love, it has been very well said, “its madness is to believe itself eternal.”
If, indeed, as the novel claims, the soul’s pleasures can be greater than its sorrows can be...
...for our life is an infancy and our body is only a cradle.