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December 13.
What is properly thought is never hard (is never rough), and can be expressed as it is conceived without lacking grace, without artifice and without preparation. But the projection given it, the bile that may mingle with it, alter its quality.
I do not take back what I said of Fiévée. I repeat, “he has punch,” or strength of wrist. I have defined him wholly by that one word.
December 14.
Self-evidence has something poetic about it... Should not its language bear the effects of this? When one descends from the rays of light, one is more than a mortal.
That credulity which comes from the heart does no harm to the mind.
Throughout their literature, and even in their smallest sentences, one perpetually finds the names of things that ought to occupy man’s attention. Here are some of these beautiful words: friend, friendship, city, citizen, concord, destiny, feasts, fortune, family, fields, countryside, song, harmony, oxen, cattle, herds, team, necessity, joy, peace, triumph, victory, goods, life, old men, women and children, manners, virtue, goodness, and their opposites: ills, death, sickness, envy, enmities, war, poisons, hunger, cold, heat, the moist, the dry, widowhood, orbity or the loss of children (a word we lack), the condition of the orphan, poverty, etc.
December 15.
Of verve and taste. (Diderot speaks of them in his reflections on Terence.) Verve has more movement, taste a better-ordered movement. There is more life in the former, and more soul in the latter. Verve bounds forward, taste proceeds with measure. Verve makes more noise, but taste makes music. The former is a passion, an impulse, a need: it seeks to satisfy itself. The latter is a sentiment: “it would like to please everyone,” as Diderot observes. Mind dominating matter, reason subduing passions, and taste mastering verve make the character of the beautiful.
Verve is the sap, and taste is the gardener.
It moves in spurts.
“To call upon one’s mind.” The phrase is Samuel Johnson’s. — One must wait for it, listen to it, plumb it.
Marmontel. This man had only the wit he had made for himself. Besides, it is a very singular talent and a very singular power to give oneself wit when one has none.
They had for one another a kind of hypocritical esteem and friendship.
December 16.
... who do not count God in the census of beings, nor piety in the enumeration of the virtues man needs. What a faulty cosmogony and what a faulty morality!
Respect, better still to feel than to inspire. For the respectful man is always estimable. This sentiment has as its principle and its underlying cause an opinion of excellence and an idea of perfection that cannot form in those in whom nothing is excellent.
Actors, in society, charged with amusing its boredoms and reviving its languors.