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.
February […] (Shrove Tuesday, le bonhomme matin.)
Of the pleasure people take in feeling themselves taught. It would suffice for their happiness. To be its cause ought also to suffice for our ambition. But we want to dazzle. It is not enough for us to be cherished, to be useful. A gentle light imperceptibly insinuated into minds brings them a joy that grows there through reflection. Let us shine like the moon, let us renounce too much splendor.
Yes, an actor (like a painting) should have an air of half body, half shadow, half reality. This is founded on the nature of his art, whose object is representation. His tears, his cries, his language, his gestures should seem half feigned and half true. For a spectacle to be beautiful, one must believe one is imagining and dreaming what one hears there, what one sees, and everything there must seem to us a beautiful dream.
February 24.
Yes, into the composition of every perfect happiness there inevitably enters the idea of having deserved it.
February 28.
“Order avenges itself,” he used to say; and not through God, but God is order.
Through moral taste, what is judged criminal or base horrifies the intelligence, (as that senseless author of the book entitled The Search for Truth in Ourselves, under the title of Rom[e], said very well and this horror stops the involuntary movements of pleasure or prevents their effects.
“The wicked man will perish.” How far the sense of this saying can extend.
She has the body to govern (intelligence).
March 2.
Fléchier. This elegance in which the sublime has hidden itself, is radiance deliberately tempered, this beauty that has veiled itself, this beauty wholly within, this grandeur that encloses itself in little space, this height that has reduced itself to the level of the common run of men, these vast forms that take up so little room (like our mind itself), these sentences that in their brevity have so much meaning, these deep thoughts as limpid, as clear as what is superficial, this art in which nature is entire... More openness, a higher flight...
Fléchier. Why more esteemed fifty years ago than he seems to be today. Why more enjoyed at that time. Why more praised by Rolin.
Mme de G[enlis] is right. “It is stronger than I am” is a “vulgar” saying, and not merely “vulgar,” as she calls it, but more than popular, that is to say, excusable only in those whose education, the coarseness of their life, and the violence of their honor have not allowed them to gain any command over themselves.
March 3.
Someone said of an asthmatic man very gentle and very patient in his sufferings: “One would like to breathe for him.”
March […].
Indeed, in many things I resemble the butterfly. Like it I love the light, like it I burn my life in it, like it I need, in order to spread my wings, fair weather around me in society, and my mind to feel surrounded and as though penetrated by a mild temperature, that of indulgence. I need the looks of favor to shine upon me.
The mind’s natural pace. And what movements one must give it so that it is neither wearied by speed nor numbed or made impatient by slowness.
February […]5.
He made us kings and pilots by giving us the body and life to govern.
Venus, loved by Phoebus, obtained from him a few rays of his light. She fastened some of them to her star, and from this comes that uncertain light so favorable to pleasures. We call it evening and morning, or twilight, or half-light. When this charming star shines alone in the sky at the first hour of evening and morning, the young man has light without being seen, whether he is going to the place where the young woman awaits him before the earth sleeps, or leaving her in the morning before [two or three illegible words]. The goddess used the rest of the rays she had from blond Phoebus to make Love a torch, and from this also comes that uncertain brightness and that ever-imperfect light which, when love lights their way, allows men to see all the beauties of what pleases them, but not its faults.
Sunday, March 6.
Unpleasant foreshortenings in style.