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.
When there are no more libraries and few books are, as it were, saved, people will probably hide the smallest, those containing at once the most doctrine and the fewest words, just as in a fire, a pillage, a flight, one carries away the diamonds first.
The childhood of art (they say). But it also has its old age and its time of luxury and corruption. We must strive unceasingly to bring it back to its manhood, or better still to its adolescence—(And, on this subject, the adolescence of art.) [The adolescence of art] is elegant; and its manhood, full of pomp; and its old age, rich, but overloaded with ornaments that conceal its wasting away.
A young body full of juices, without plumpness.
Without Telemachus, who would know Fénelon? Without his Discourse on Universal History and his funeral orations, who would know Bossuet? Pascal, Labruyère, Vauvenargues and even Larochefoucaud are the delights of the delicate. Boileau, Racine and Lafontaine are in small volumes. Very good writers write little because it takes much time to reduce their abundance or their riches to beauty. “Unable to make her beautiful, you made her rich,” an ancient said of a Venus. This saying can be applied etc., etc.
... and return to that freedom of mind whose charms are dangerous, so they say, but whose good use is certainly the most useful thing in the world.
June 21.
He is (you say) hopping. Yes; like a bird moving about in its tree. But make him cleave the air: he will fly, he will soar.
Ah! how do you expect one to soar, except through imperceptible and equal times and movements. For observe that in this operation of flight, one advances while remaining, as it were, motionless.
—It is the natural language of a mind that soars as it speaks.
June 22.
The expression “to speak gold.” Some speak in big sols, some others in assignats. (On Condillac, on the Institute.)
Tradere memoriae. The aim of the art of writing is to deliver to people’s memory what one has seen, what one has known, and what one thinks. Style that is a friend to remembrance: the style that attracts attention, holds it, recalls it is therefore the one...
“To speak of great things with coldness.” Paschal made it one of the marks of J.-C.’s divinity. See the preface to his works in the first editions.—And it is sometimes a sign of stupidity. But in the two cases the bearing and the tone are not the same.
June 23.
The dog and the bonds of hospitality. By these alone he feels himself enchained. As long as he has not eaten the master’s bread or contracted the alliance of bread;... This animal has an idea of dominion and of a certain scale or dependence of powers. He distinguishes his master’s masters, which neither the horse nor the ox does. Those recognize only the auriga and the bootès.
Pascal. Fortunate in this, that part of his genius has remained in shadow and the other part has shown itself. The imagination... and each completes it as he pleases.
June […]4 (St. John.)
The incredible desire to drink at the springs the water that surrounds them. Thus the human mind delights in going back to origins. An inexhaustible attraction seems to invite it there without end. Just as these inhabitants of the waters are stopped in their search now by long embankments, now by high rocks, so... But the minds that can surmount these obstacles will glimpse at the farthest point only a trickle of water and drops following one another out of the vast ocean.
June […]6.
Gaulish (Gaulish-French). A language midway between foreign languages and our own. The use one can draw from it. In it we see words at their origin and our constructions being tried out. In it we learn what our grandfathers attempted, what they wanted, what they could do; what our fathers decided, interrupted...