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April 24.
The soul is an animating faculty, determined to become and to subsist, a personality once it has contributed to some individual existence.—The soul is the man, that is, what in the human personality loves, thinks, and exists forever once it has existed.
Life, like fire, is born of friction. Moisture and fire are not incompatible.
Life is spread everywhere. All space is filled with it. Like fire it kindles, flares up, and becomes fixed as it unites with the individual, like fire when it consumes a candle.
April 25.
Why do I tire myself so much by speaking? Because, when I speak, one part of my fibers becomes so active while the other remains slack; the part that acts bears alone the strain and weight of the action, which soon overwhelms it. Just as there is an unequal distribution of strength in me, there is an unequal distribution of activity in all my parts. Hence total fatigue when what was strong is tired, for then weakness is everywhere.
Through this kind of existence (with senses that are extinguished and powers that diminish), one belongs more to the life to come than to the present life, and one is unhappy if, no longer able to live on this one, one refuses to live on the other either. One tries to hold on to departing goods with hands powerless to grasp them, and withdraws, turns away from goods that come and, so to speak, give themselves to us, so well do they suit and fit our weakness, and so little strength and life do they require to be enjoyed. At this time of life, memory, a faculty almost wholly corporeal, has scarcely any spring left, and by a remarkable blessing, credulity is extreme. Instead, then, of trying (as one obstinately does) to revive one’s memories or strengthen one’s hopes, [gap]... only to nourish them, only to surrender to them, only to immerse oneself in them, for that alone is what we have remained fit for. Now, hopes at this age can no longer have as their object, etc.
When men are feeble-minded, the one who is mad dominates the others.
April 29.
Their counsels are cited by human mouths among the most renowned: and vain, they have received vain rewards and as light as themselves.
April 21.
The tomb swallows us, but it does not digest us. We are consumed, not destroyed.
God made life to be practiced (the world to be inhabited), not to be known.
That a man must be androgynous and unite the two natures; but woman must be simple, that is, have only one nature within her.
Thoughts of which one can say: “There is rest in this thought.” This image is encouraging.
Our flesh is only our pulp. Our bones, our membranes, our nerves are only as it were a framework of the stone in which we are enclosed as in a case. This bodily envelope dissipates by exfoliation, but the kernel it contains, the invisible being it encloses, remains whole, is indestructible.
Contradiction irritates us only because it disturbs our peaceful possession of some opinion or some preeminence. That is why the weak are more irritated by it than the strong, and the infirm more than the healthy.