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Modern dramatists.—They have made their art a game in which, to win the prize and avoid a loss, one must observe certain difficult and useless rules and formulas that they have agreed upon among themselves.
It is almost always with the difficulties arising from his ideas, and not with the difficulties arising from things[,] that man grapples in the discussions with which he torments his own mind and the minds of others. Likewise, one believes a subject obscure, and often it is not the subject but the treatise that is obscure. It is not the material that bores, but the work.
When nothing but obscurity is born of a thought, one must reject it, renounce it, abandon it.
God is the place where I do not remember the rest.
Whenever an idea is clear, however perplexing the objection that attacks it, the objection is false; to dwell on it is to be duped.
November 24.
Camille Desmoulins. His memory was a palette loaded with colors and ready-made paintings. His attention had only to take.
To combat objections is often only to destroy phantoms. One illuminates nothing by doing so; one merely silences those who obscure.
Without allusions to the Bible, there would no longer be anything artless, familiar, or of the people in the good books written in our language.
December 7.
In compensation for enlightenment, men have credulity. It is a gift from God. It gives the mind rest, peace, calm, clarity.
December 8.
One is never permitted to strip oneself of politeness in order to wrestle.
December 14.
And those who came later will never have seen models. There have been none for a long time.
No one willing to subject his will to another’s...
December 25.
Piety is to the heart what poetry is to the imagination, what a beautiful metaphysics is to the mind. It exercises the whole extent of our sensibility.