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May 3.
Instead of complaining that the rose has thorns, one should rejoice that the thorn is crowned with roses and that the bush bears flowers.
Avoid buying a closed book.
That is to exercise the tyrannies of the mind rather than its powers and its dominion.
Not to judge people by their affairs.
If a knife has a handle, why take it by the blade?
May 7.
Digestion also takes place through the force of the muscles, whose warmth and squeezing knead the food and cook it repeatedly. This is something those whose digestion is laborious only because their digestive juice is too scanty can establish by an experience that, to be conclusive, needs only to be subjected to constant attention. They feel in their stomach a dilation and contractions that make this organ resemble, in its workings, a hand that presses and wrings. The very shape of the thoroughly digested matter they evacuate bears the mark of this internal grinding. Plainly, they digest well only by force. Thus food does little to restore them. In giving it to themselves, they consume more vital vigor than they receive by assimilating it.
Pleasures are always children; pains are always wrinkled.
May 12.
Mr d. P.—I like what he does better than what he esteems.
Tell Mélanthe that he has a great talent. He remains grave, he is distracted, he does not listen. Tell him he is a great poet, he gives you some attention. Add that he is not only a great poet but the greatest of our poets, the poet par excellence, he hears you, he answers you, he gives thanks, he is pleased. You can guess.
May 13.
Constant.—Jusque datum sceleri canimus (Lucan). All these foreigners have been nothing but wretched corrupters of our reason and our language.
May 14.
Middle Ages (history of the). The events themselves were too complicated for their history to be clear.
May 15.
Geneva. In this atom of a republic, people have applied themselves diligently to knowing imperceptible objects. (See Saussure’s hygrometer, Bonnet’s observations.) Nowhere else in the world has the microscope been used so assiduously.