To say only that he created it or made it is wiser. For to assign the from what and the how in unknown questions is, as Pascal says, uncertain, difficult, painful, superfluous, and insecure. Yet when the how, by supposition, can serve to instill more deeply belief in the real fact...

Everything is done through images. They enter us through all the other senses as through the eye. The echo (they say) is an image of the voice. All our affections are produced by the images of touch. Our whole body is a mirror.

His own intelligence, the sole cause of will.

Order, or accord with God, has analogy or relation for its foundation.

All those who have thought much of God will doubtless see him.

Everything that makes us believe much in him is good. But one must [not] allow or allow oneself anything that discredits the faith.

February 19 (Shrovetide Saturday).

Everything consists in finding the idea that can make them intelligible; and, as beautiful forms in the arts, so beautiful ideas in metaphysics. What is needed here is music, not arithmetic, perspective in execution and not geometry, images not figures, for bodies are not at issue.

To turn morals into calculation (into accounts of gains and losses), metaphysics into physics, is to destroy them both.

There are ways of conceiving toward which the mind is borne by its own nature and perhaps also by a confused glimpse of the truth that shines for us. Such is this idea, etc. “This ray emanating from the supreme essence.” I quote poets because they have more of these ideas than all other authors. Thus you find the same ideas among the poets of all nations. The mind also has methods it makes for itself for its convenience; and those natural to it are found everywhere, in China and Isfahan as in Athens. Read Plato and Aristotle, read the Chinese classics and the logic of the Arabs.

Hippocrates said of his art: “it is learned and (yet) it cannot be taught” (entirely). One must say as much of metaphysics.

In the style of these first writers, words are clear, are noble, or are grave, each having a complete meaning. The sentence has few limbs, few joints, and is read entire at a glance, just as it is understood by a single movement of attention. Everything in it is intelligible in itself.

Like luminous drops...

Their mind, trained to make fewer movements, had more dignity for it. Ours have acquired such rapidity of action that they are fit for contortions.

February 20.

Pleasures one notices only when one no longer enjoys them.

Love and pleasure. Love (as Leibniz says very well) is a joy in the perfection of what one loves and in contemplating it: pleasure is only a joy of sex or of existence; love is a joy of essence.

The brute part in every man. Of those in whom it is lively but light and fine and easily exhales; and of those in whom it is thick, opaque, substantial, less inclined to evaporate than to fall back upon itself. And of those in whom it is violent, inflamed, ardent, terrible: a volcano of fire, as in others it is a volcano of water.

In the arts. To banish from them everything that can be too rigorously appraised, everything that can too easily be counterfeited. One does not want to see too clearly where the suppressions come from. The Naiad must hide her urn there, the Nile must hide its sources.

Would one not say that the place a great man leaves empty at his death is a post to which someone must necessarily be appointed, whoever he may be? When this people loses a great man, it makes itself another, as though it had more need of admiration than of merit. Lekain is no more, so it applauds Laffond. It admired Legouvé and held him a great poet when no other appeared. We have nothing better (it says), or this is the best we have. But what if your best is bad? Besides, do you not have books?

I will not call first the man who does not have a radical primacy in himself. For the matter is not one of number and reckoning, but of essential excellence.

And time alone (I am going to astonish you), yes, time alone seems a reality to me, because it is linked to imperishable nature, to intellectual and moral nature, for which, for example, repentance after fault or forgetting after a benefit, etc.

And, for another example, time has a measure other than movement, which is a physical thing; it has action, which is a moral thing.

February […].

“...That is the image of despotism,” says Montesquieu. Add: and as the savage sacrifices his subsistence to his hunger, despotism sacrifices its might to its power. (Expressions too minute). His reign devours the reign of his successors.

...are too minute and have a subtlety that seems too grammatical. Let us raise them with these: Every despot has a reign that devours that of his successors. We heighten our thought. And if we add further: that of his predecessors and his own, we give it a complement of energy and grandeur through this image of a greed that devours itself and devours the centuries.

And, in another style: it is a Gargantua who eats himself.

If I added to this image the words: in his voracity, or still more: in his insatiable voracity, I would weaken the image and remove it from the attention at the very moment I had presented it strongly and entire. When the image is strong and complete, one must generally detach the thought from it, as I would do if, after the words eats himself, I said: His insatiable greed, in a new paragraph.

And in yet another [style], for the moral: When one can live only on eggs, one must not eat the hens one has.

General rule: join the thought to the image, but do not mingle them, for fear that one may weaken the other.