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YEAR 1796
... Here the earth is firm; no tremor shakes it.
January 3.
Put his pen in his hands, and give him this instrument. Then he will show his art, his taste, his strength, his genius. Then you will know this man (Sen:) His pen? His mind, without this instrument, is like a plectrum without a bow, like a musician’s mouth without a horn, without a flute, or without a bassoon.
January 4.
Viscera impiorum crudelia. (Èclés.)
To the left (that is, in the west) was the black side, the side of darkness. And to the right, or in the east, was the bright side, the white side, the fortunate side. By the left, the ancients always meant the west or the north.
January 5.
— and minds grow decrepit.
Religious virtues only increase with age. They grow rich on the ruin of the passions and the loss of pleasures. Purely human virtues, on the contrary, diminish and grow poorer through them.
To the orange tree. Merely lays down its leaves for a moment, to take them up again the next.
Preserve what your fathers have seen.
Monuments are the bonds and the clamps that join one generation to another.
The ancients knew anatomy only through war. It was on the battlefields that they had learned all they knew of it.
A slavery called freedom.
Swiss innkeepers whose liberties give them the right to be usurers with impunity.
It is better that there should be many dupes than many scoundrels.
January 6.
Mildness of the temperature.
Prejudice that covers its eyes.
In every uneducated class, women are worth more than men, and in every distinguished class one finds men superior to women. This is because men have a greater capacity to be rich in acquired virtues, and women in natural or native virtues.
Warm clothes or light ones. Put them on late, take them off late.
Ab assuetis non fit passio. If novelty is indispensable to bringing the passions to birth, variety is necessary to keep them alive.