No individual date printed

III

— Nature well ordered, contemplated by man well ordered: that is poetic beauty.

— There is scarcely a philosopher who has principles. Go through their writings: you will see isolated truths, ruins scattered here and there from a building of which not a single foundation stone can be found.

— O noble human species, how many years, five-year spans, and centuries will pass before you reach the point beyond which lies perfection.

— Dardenne is dead. What a death! And what a loss! How many errors he would have destroyed, how many truths he would have taught. Perhaps I shall die at his age, alas, and the experience of two good men will be lost to their fellows.

— I think that a man with no language in which to express himself would have fewer ideas and would attend to a smaller number of sensations. His memory and imagination would be less rich...

— It would be useful to inquire whether the shapes a bird that has never seen a nest gives to its own nest have some analogy with its inner constitution.

I would be inclined to believe that there are ideas that come to us from our inner forms.

Is instinct not, in every case, the effects of the necessary impressions produced by certain sensations? Is it not pure mechanism?

The very speed with [which] we act through what is called instinct does [not] allow us to observe ourselves at that moment. And so instinct and reflection never have the same subjects. Perhaps that is why the more instinct an animal is endowed with, the less reason it is endowed with.

Quadrupeds have more intelligence than birds: in touch they have an additional sense, or at least that sense develops more in them.

— Reptiles must be the most prudent of animals. Their notions must almost always be clear and true; they must have much ignorance and few errors.

— Fish must be, like birds of prey, shrewd and limited.

— The taste of the Chinese is ceremonious and bizarre, like themselves. How could a people that knows so little of poetic beauty know moral beauty? When you are told that a people is learned, always examine how far it knows beauty in the arts if you wish to know whether it is great and virtuous.

— Architecture must portray men by portraying places. A building must announce to the eyes the one who inhabits it; and stone, marble, and glass must speak and tell us what they hide from us.

— Our windows, by their form and arrangement, could supply the effects of ancient columns, and they have one further advantage. Those great windows, those sheets of glass seem to announce two very agreeable things: light and a warm welcome.

— In the East, where men are more numerous, they are treated as cheap and abundant products are treated everywhere. They are consumed without necessity.

— In reading the history of all peoples, one becomes convinced that they must have a common origin. Their religious errors are striking in their resemblances. Either this is a fatal inheritance handed down by a first people to the other peoples, its children; or it is a contagion carried from place to place by travelers from every country.

— We do not notice that the charm of Lafontaine’s fables lies in the choice of his characters... They ask only to come near you.

— Morality, that science of making oneself happy and just, is perhaps the least advanced of all. Its true foundations are so little known that some philosophers, who nevertheless believed virtue could be demonstrated, since they wished to teach it, regarded it purely as an innate feeling. It is quite true that at birth we have a secret awareness of our destination; there do indeed seem to be ideas that do not come to us from outside. There are mechanical actions. And it would be of no small use to seek how far they have an analogy with that inner mold, so little known.

— A profound idea, which served as a kind of basis for a system of legislation he was contemplating. An important and new idea that reveals the defect in all political institutions. All have sacrificed one part of man to the other, and have opposed his happiness no less than his completion. Instead of hastening and guiding the development of his social affections, all have either led them astray or destroyed them; all have prevented him from growing, rising, and extending himself, like those unfortunate trees mutilated in all their branches and forcibly bent a hundred ways to a use that ought not to have been theirs.

Man is imperfect and wicked only because he has some passions and does not have them all. His passions are bad only when they are turned away from the object made for them or are not combined with one another in their fitting proportion.

According to him...

— Indeed, the enlightened man, having more numerous, more extensive, and better directed enjoyments than other men, possesses more of his whole nature than they do, just as someone who has all his senses exists more than someone who has only one or two.

And so he made “the sole principle of a being’s felicity” consist in the full development of all its faculties.

— Among the Romans, for example, the love of esteem was turned from its true object by the passion for conquest. At Lacedaemon and Carthage, by the greed for gain. Love of men was stifled by patriotism.

— Those who wish to bring everything back to natural equality are wrong. There is no natural equality. Strength, ingenuity, and reason establish differences between men at every step. It is the masterpiece of human reason.

No individual date printed

IV

— And the air, in which all seeds are contained, and the earth, that universal womb, and water, which gives growth to the germs, and fire, the essential principle of every generative force.

— Those people are not men and women; they are males and females.

— D. said to me one day: “I would like the people to be given a good dinner, a good supper, a good coat every day; a good bed every night, and blows with a stick every morning.”

— There is a certain modesty to be kept in misery; its principle is that praiseworthy repugnance, natural to all well-born men, to exposing disgusting and disagreeable objects to the eyes of others.

We must take great care not to injure this decent feeling, either in others or in ourselves.

There are men whose benefactions violate misfortune, if one may put it so; there are others whose complaints or demeanor in a sense prostitute their unhappiness to every passerby.

The poor man must have the modesty of young virgins, who speak of their sex and their infirmities only with restraint, in secret, and from necessity.

A shameless misery always betrays a common soul.

Young men, speak among yourselves of your difficulties as young girls speak among themselves of their monthly courses: that is, laughing and frolicking.

— Men are children. We must forgive them everything except malice.

— The people are base?... It is because they are the people. Pity them, then, for being the people, and desire another state of things in which there are neither great nor small.

— The sense of the ridiculous is an excellent instinct. Through it we know that we must avoid a multitude of things that would harm our shared pleasures.