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The deacon Pâris.—O religion! you give a light to ignorance, a virtue to weakness, an aptitude and a skill to ineptitude, even a talent to incapacity. You give the most limited minds an existence useful to the world.
Minds incapable of care. And: thoughts that have long remained in the mind. “I have lived with the rose.” And that: the same taste that leads us to do well forces us to do again, to do little, to do slowly, by making us reluctant to approve what we have done. And that: the better is the enemy of the good only when we seek it, not when we see it. More than that, we do well only when we know where the better lies and have made sure of it, have touched it and hold it in our power. And that: it is not things that please, but the impression of itself that the mind puts and leaves in them, for only mind pleases mind, soul soul. Except in a single thing, whose power, in which the mind takes little part, is independent of thought and will, being necessary to the multiplication of souls and the perpetuity of the human race.
The thoughts that come to us are worth more than those we find.
April […].
The happy word is the one that comes last, and it is this word that is essential to the reader. It is this one that determines the work’s whole fate.
April […]1.
There are two kinds of words: the one that suffices to make our thought manifest to ourselves, and the one necessary to make it manifest to others. They differ. And, the first, more promptly than the second.
April […]2.
—and let it be a work, either through form or through substance.
I have more vital spirits than animal spirits.—And the spirits that go into my head are no longer in my stomach.
... I understand it too well to be able to translate it.
April […]8.
To know what one must forbid oneself.
... because the mind has then given itself two movements for one, and they are perceived.
April […]9.
The workers. Of any idea, only as much presents itself to them as they need for the place where it is to be used. They have never conceived a single one in its independent roundness.
Wednesday, April 27 (At Thuilʳˢ.)
Poetry. The idea of each thing must be there, and not the body.
April 30.
When your sentence is made, you must carefully remove its corners and the other imprints of your particular caliber. You must round it so that it can enter easily into other minds, into other memories.