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YEAR 1784
No individual date printed
XI
When they say that art is an imitation, they define it by its procedure or manner of operating, and not by its object. I would prefer to say that art is a multiplication, for then I would define it by its effect and its usefulness. Art in fact exists only to multiply the things that move our senses by representing them to us, and it is useful only in multiplying beautiful things around us: that is, things that move us agreeably, usefully, delightfully, and in a way that makes us happy.
No individual date printed
XII
Whoever extinguishes a feeling of benevolence in man kills him partially.
— Poets must be the great study of the philosopher who wishes to know man.
— The habit of thinking gives us facility in it. It makes us more penetrating and quicker to see everything, because it makes the organs of thought more flexible and better nourished.
— How many judgments we form, full of rightness and admirable besides, which are made so rapidly that they elude the reflection that observes them in order to entrust them to memory!
Such is the one that makes us put our hands forward when we fall. Almost all those that have as their end the ideas that come from within ourselves are of this kind.
— “Why do you punish your son if he is not free?” Precisely because he is not free. It is you who are senseless to punish yours if he is free in the sense you say he is.
— If I die and leave a few scattered thoughts on important subjects, I implore, in the name of humanity, those who find themselves their custodians to suppress nothing of whatever may seem to depart from received ideas. During my life I loved only truth. I have reason to think that I saw it on many great subjects. Perhaps one of these [words?] that I shall have thrown down in haste [...].
In January 1784.
Women love adventures, encounters, chances, because they love to give themselves and not to be given. For this sex, to make sweet use of one’s body is to dispose of it freely. Once they have performed this act of freedom, it depends only on men whether they remain constant. Apart from this, they are constant at heart in only one case: when they have been taken by force; I mean physical force and not social force.
This violence makes them hope for great power over the man they have mastered to the point of driving him beyond himself; just as they hope for great forbearance from the man to whom they have sacrificed everything.
Note. This violence must be that of the man in love, and not that of the brutal man.