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— Everything that makes the passions purer makes them stronger, more lasting, and more delightful.

— Man’s education could be so arranged that all his prejudices would be truths, and all his feelings virtues.

— As for the existence of beings whose nature would differ from the nature of all known beings, no conjecture should be adopted.

— Reason is, in man, the universal supplement to nature’s impotence.

— It is for poets to form languages, for philosophers to reform them. How many words are errors! And if the inheritance of discoveries that each generation ought to pass on were as considerable as it could be, how many revolutions would occur in a language every hundred years.

— Writers, writers, forget the past and think only of the future.

— Ah! To please corrupt peoples, one must depict passions as disordered as they are. These souls, whose disorder has made great emotions necessary to them, crave excess in their implacable hunger. In this way men accustomed to the fear of the tempest, the hope of calm, all the great agitations brought by long and perilous voyages, no longer savor rest and land, and ceaselessly demand the sea and its reefs, the storm and its horrors.

— See at the theater how quick the intuition of stirred souls is, how exquisite their discernment!... In the moment of universal emotion, there is not a single man who has no taste.

— How beautiful feelings make the face beautiful — that man seemed an angel to me in that moment of tears and sensibility — a moment later he became calm again; I wanted to look at him; he was hideous.

— Intelligence and sensibility are, in the animal, only a surplus of feeling and life.

— The molecules that animate and enliven the intellectual fibers are sent to them from every part of man. The continual habit of reflection constantly draws to the head what was intended to nourish the other parts of man — since intelligence in man is the product of all his other faculties, it must in each man share in their degree of excellence.

— How is it, nevertheless, that intelligence makes moral life and feeling flow back into every part of man?...

— Such is the strength of the organs of thought that, of all the causes acting on us, they are the most powerful.

— On poets.

— Here is the cause of all the faults of French authors: they write, they think, they speak, they judge, they imagine too quickly... And this comes from the fundamental vice of our ways of life: we are in too much haste to live and to enjoy; we enjoy and we live too quickly.

— In France, it seems that people love the arts more to judge them than to enjoy them.

— Natural man must be defined as the one who lives, thinks, and feels in the way most in keeping with order.

— Human perfectibility has no bounds because we can join to our knowledge that of all the men who have preceded us, to our powers those of all the beings that exist with us.

— Man changes into iron, into flame, into a fish, etc., when he uses a mallet, a furnace, a ship, etc.

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No. 6

It is, as has been very well observed, because animals have only the perfectibility of the individual and not the perfectibility of the species; that is, they can learn, but they can teach nothing.

— What animals know without education, they know through the testimony of their bodily organization. And so they all know it.

— Egoism is self-love in the most individual sense.

— The misfortunes of the human species come from man’s fault.

— Well, if he has painted you a son without respect or love for his father, if someone else depicts faithless lovers, friends without loyalty, unnatural fathers, murderous wives! Effeminate men, is it his fault? It is the fault of your ways of life. And every trait of these hateful characters tells you, “This is what your institutions have made.”

— Your commerce is only a war of money; your commerce has given you the greed that gnaws at you; your commerce has caused half your ills. And has done you no good. O great men, and you speak of the advantages of commerce! It is because you conceive a very different kind of commerce. Commerce would be beautiful, more beautiful even than you have conceived it, if it were conducted from one people to another solely in a rivalry of generosity and beneficence.

— Great souls too often see in our institutions a greatness that is not there, but could be there. The same perfection that makes them elevate everything, and makes their gaze shed, in some way, a kind of greatness on everything they contemplate, also makes them often mistaken.

— Paint, in the exclusive and dominant passions, the cry of the nature they torment and the effort of the soul they exhaust.

— (I must seek how far, according to the hypothesis of universal order, the union of man and woman can be exclusive; how far they can become one another’s property.)

— Let work and rest divide waking time equally in your institutions.

— We attach ourselves to the ways of life that have been, to the ways of life that are; we grasp only fleeting forms... They think of the ways of life that ought to be.

— Think of the past when you deliberate, of the present when you enjoy, of the future in everything you do.

— The best moral habits (or habits) guide man only in a given number of circumstances. Virtue alone (or principles) makes his life one, all his actions upright, and ensures that he will always know what he ought to do and will never be astonished at what he has done.

— “If one cannot be happy without virtue, one cannot be virtuous without a little happiness.” This is very well said, and in general it is very true.

— It was a fine enough reward for his labors to console himself for seeing them unrewarded.

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II

I am seeking what rank women ought to hold in the republic. We have made them a kind of property. Is this dominion we have taken over them just? I remember the principle we established above: “Whenever, through some institution, even one of a being’s rights is injured, that institution is bad.”

I examine what exists, and I see that, in our morality, the right to dispose of oneself can be legitimately exercised by a woman only once in an entire lifetime. I see in our ways of life a perpetual transgression of this law. Is it our ways of life or our morality that must be condemned?

I recall another of our principles: “How could what innocent souls can commit without remorse be a crime?” And I see that women who transfer their loves and caresses to men other than the one to whom they first gave themselves are often gentle, hardworking, humane, and even chaste. I see them yield to their inclinations with the security that virtue inspires, if nothing can become known of their secret pleasures.

I confess that their conduct then seems to me a reasonable protest against that law I see established everywhere, rather than a criminal violation of it.