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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1793

January 21, 1793.

Note. A new festival at the beginning of each new month.

To give a people laws of their own is to give them fortified, impenetrable (moral) borders.

Note. — Air. The figure, the physiognomy, and the air...

The 25th of the first month, January 1793

Wisdom is the strength of the weak.

To teach is to learn twice.

All inconstancy is a groping.

Death will fill their mouth with earth.

His ink has the colors of the rainbow.

January 27, 1793.

So that the play of society may be carried out...

February 10

The time has come when seven women will take one man.

February 19

Light descends and darkness rises. Light comes to us from heaven and darkness from the earth.

February 22

The will is a hand with which one bends whatever one wishes within oneself.

S1.Source editor’s annotationThe pages of the notebook relating to the years 1793 and 1794 are extremely crowded. The dates are intermingled in a confusion in which it is not always possible to find one’s way, whether Joubert wrote from day to day without following the order of the pages, or sometimes recopied old notes (without arranging them).

S2.Source editor’s annotationOn this date, Joubert notes: “Note. Books for children. — Duffrenoy, at Citizen Hesmard’s, rue de la Monnoye, no. 28, near rue Boucher. C. F.”

S3.Source editor’s annotationThen: “In the blade and in the sheaf. — Janus. They declared war in consideration of the future and the past.”

S1.Source editor’s annotation1793, I think. But it may be 1794.

S2.Source editor’s annotationThe same observation. On the same date: “Evolutions of the mind... The smallest good shall have its reward. — He had had no friends during his life, and none appeared to welcome him, etc. But the intelligences, witnesses, etc.” And “passage of M. de V.y.” Is this the Abbé de Vitry? Probably.

S3.Source editor’s annotation1793, I think.