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Your Michaud, who has a perpetual extinction in his mind as in his voice.
September 15.
We are priests of Vesta. Our life is the sacred fire that we are all charged with tending until God himself extinguishes it within us.
Anger. Its fermentation necessary to bring certain gentle and peaceful feelings to maturity. But if the crisis does not occur, if the fermentation leads only to its own sourness, the operation has not yielded its fruit and the natural course has not run to completion.
September 16.
The pomps of flattery and the simplicities of greatness (even its negligences): (Voltaire, the elegance of a courtier. Bossuet, the simplicity of a great man.) The arrangements of falsehood or fiction, the unconstraint of truth—or better—so much attention to pleasing one’s reader bespeaks more vanity than virtue, more intent to seduce than to serve, more ambition than authority, more art than nature, and all these graces call for a great master more than a great man.
And yet the care taken to speak truth well, to tame attention, is a duty, a function of the sage, a mark of his goodness.
Bossuet. His style, in which Gaulish frankness and good nature make themselves felt with such grandeur. He is full of pomp, he is sublime and popular. He is almost artless.
One can make an ornament of a break. Recesses are picturesque. There is a continuous pleasure or convenience in level ground—variety in the uneven disposition of the terrain. Tiers have their charm, and one can ascend to high things by steps.
One could determine precisely many occasions when vagueness must be used.
My thought then turns back, like a body when it encounters another that is hard and that it cannot penetrate.
They call wit what is only play within the mind.
To learn with method and effort what is learned of itself and mechanically. Dancing does not make our limbs better formed, nor method our minds more beautiful; but the exercise all this gives to mind and body can make them more agile and supple. We must observe, however, that there are movements, exercises capable of dislocating us.
To fix the language (in the sciences and especially in metaphysics) important. To preserve as far as possible the expressions great men have used.
— Let us say then because the sensible draws us away from God. But of all that is sensible, nothing is so much so as what is intimately so. And that is why chastity and piety have always been joined in an inseparable association in all religious doctrines.
Intimately, and so to speak in the entrails. There lie the great pleasures and the great pains. There lie...
September […].
Voltaire. One is no poet on the run and in haste, in passing.