“One must (says Plutarch) be a magistrate every day and at every hour.” “Known, a good man, at every hour.”—“Government has no particular end”; but order in all things and embracing everything. The good man anxious about public affairs and constantly occupied with them, who watches over them, who dreams of them even in sleep, who provides for them even in his recreations and down to his jests, there is the magistrate. He must tend to the state as a good farmer to his field. The keeping of the flock.

Bacon says that axioms are the touchstone and the best test of minds, which show their limits and their reach in them. Nothing is so easy as making them badly, nor so rare as excelling at them.

Words, and whether they have more importance than sentences.

Our memory has more pains to take than that of the ancients. We have more books to read and more facts to know than they did in order to know everything. And our mind more overburdened.

September […].

The silence of the pen and its advantages. Strength gathers there. Precision must emerge from it. A chatterer who has fallen silent. When silence comes from strength, that strength must make itself felt in the discourse. What is unconsidered would be wrong upon reflection.—To know how not to write or—capable of not writing.

It occurred to me whether one might not consider the body as an actual animal, a beast of burden, a mount that carries the soul, that is given to us to govern and that has appetites of its own. But it seemed to me that this idea, useful in morality, because morality deals only with the use of things, would be pernicious in metaphysics, the science that deals with natures; it would confuse our own nature in our eyes. As a passing aspect and a mere point of view, the body can be considered in this way; and in action, in conduct or practice, we can treat it so; but in speculation and as a fixed doctrine, this idea would be worth nothing: it would deceive us, etc. And presenting to the mind only an oblique sense, apt to make the mind squint...

September […].

And intemperance in writing? And these books made through babble, so to speak, these chattering works, etc.

September […]1.

Do what we will, people’s first question is always “what is this?” “What good is it?” is only the second. So much is knowing our essential need, and so much is acquiring ideas our great ambition.

October […]0.

Horace. There is no imprint in him of the fine taste of his age. He merely put into his books an original talent that could have arisen and flourished under Trajan just as well as under Augustus, like a plant suited to several soils.

Plutarch. The last of the Greeks.

Massillon. Of heaven he warbles an indefinable something ravishing.

Tuesday, September 22.

Bossuet uses all our idioms, as Homer used all the dialects. The language of kings, statesmen, warriors, that of the people and the scholar; the village and the school, the sanctuary and the bar, the old and the new, the commonplace and the splendid, the muted and the sonorous, all serves him, and from all this he makes a simple, grave, majestic style. His ideas are like his words, varied, common, and sublime.

Voltaire. This mind always outside itself. It is not that he did not return within, but he did not stay there.