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Let us give the good the most beautiful names, and evil the gentlest names we can, whenever we wish to assess the treatment we have received from men. For in this way we calm ourselves.
Of passions that come from the heart, passions that come from the belly, and passions that come from the brain, where all passions ought to cool and grow calm.
July 3.
Intelligence must produce effects resembling itself, that is to say, sentiments and ideas. Matter by itself produces only sensations. Trades are in this respect like matter; the arts must aspire to the effects of intelligence. Artist! if you produce only sensations, what do you do with your art that a prostitute with her trade and the executioner with his cannot do as well as you! If there is nothing but body in your work, and if it speaks only to sense, you are only a soulless workman; only your hands are skillful.
The imagination at work is something intermediate between the senses and pure intelligence, supplementing both. It clothes in a body what intelligence has thought, and animates with a soul what has affected the senses. A bond of union between mind and matter, it improves the latter, relieves the former, and arranges for it the world in which it is a stranger. The moral man, or man compounded of soul and body, receives from it his greatest pleasures and his least harmful pleasures.
“Life (I used to say) is not given to us to be known, but to make use of it.”
B[onaparte] treats men in this way. He does not think of knowing and judging them, but of making use of them.
For everyone can give himself everything except antiquity.
It is [not] enough for things to enter the memory; they must remain there. They do not remain there unless one fastens them there. One can fasten them there only by knots. A knot can be formed only by threads tied together by being passed through one another. Methods in which the various principles are knotted together are good.
July 4.
His thought never extends beyond his sentence: this is what makes the dry style, the polytechnical style.
The poetics of philosophical style has yet to be made. There are few models of it, and no rules. Philosophical style in its perfection is the art of painting objects that have no body. Philosophical genius is the gift of seeing them. Philosophical genius is an eye. It is the eye of the mind and the imagination of the soul. Philosophical style, when good, removes everything painful from attention while making it extreme.
Force and delicacy, in the arts. Delicacy alone touches the mind, the heart. Force strikes the attention, but does not enter the soul. Whatever is merely material never penetrates it. Force is one of the characteristics of reality; but delicacy belongs to the essence of all imitation.
They speak perpetually of religion as a thing that must be excused.
July 5.
Just as necessity makes laws, so it also discovers truths. One does not think of seeking them as long as they are useless. One does not remember them as long as one has no need of them.