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In that case, then, let your vices devour you like shameful vermin...
January 5, 1796.
A father must not know whether his children are men, women. For him they must be only daughters or sons.
March 19.
Chamford. He paints them a little too much as beasts.
March 20.
The expression: I do not like to eat a book without an appetite.
The Young Anacharsis. Its style is neither Scythian nor Greek.
March 21.
An antithetical, enigmatic, elaborate turn of phrase, etc., is indispensable to the compression one is obliged to use when one wants to fit one’s thought, temper, or feeling into too narrow a space of words and time. Such a turn is then natural, and its necessity is both its excuse and its merit.
My old saying: “This sex believes innocent everything it dares.” O how well I spoke!
O my dear friend! What, do you not know how they define love? They define it as “an itch.” An itch of the whole man. Etc.
When, through the reforms one proposes, one seeks to introduce only novelty into opinions, only variety into religions, only laxity into laws, only isolation (or isolation) into morals, only expansion into fortunes, and only convenience into customs, one is working to make everything worse.
A bad appearance, indeed, is like a bad smell. That is why I cannot bear to have a bad book near me beside the best. A bad book beside a good one is an onion beside a rose. To bring together in a single collection and under the same binding a good work and a bad one is to make a bouquet of thyme and nettles.
There are people who have morality only by the bolt. It is a fabric they never make into clothes for themselves.
Give me a morality equally suited to the healthy and the sick, to men and women, to children, adults, and old people.