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Every flame is a moist fire.
Art. Nature inspires it. Whoever lacks art surely lacks naturalness.
Nature had provided for making man generous by giving him the inability to count.
May 10.
It is a dream, if you wish; but such a dream as makes one happy, and all the happier the nearer it comes to its end, because then it grows stronger, is more vivid, more absorbing, and more whole, so to speak. Such a dream, once again, is it not worth more than the others, than those of the lover, the miser, etc. We do not outlive this one. This sweet delirium [lasts] as long as our existence, and thus, according to you yourself, this opinion is a pleasant dream from which one never wakes. According to us, it is a still greater good; it is a foretaste a [certainty] of eternal felicity.
May 11.
Angels of darkness, sent to obscure truth.
Do not cut what you can untie.
May 12.
One must do good when one can, and give pleasure at every hour, for at every hour one can.
May 13.
There is a style that is only the shadow, the vague image, a drawing of thought; there is another style that is as it were its body and its sculpted portrait. The first suits metaphysics, where everything is vague, and feelings of piety, which have something of the infinite. The second better suits laws and moral maxims. The better of the two is the one that shows itself better suited to those who speak it and to what it wishes to express. Just as there are two kinds of style, then, there are two kinds of writers: some draw and paint their thought, leaving it, so to speak, applied and glued to their paper as a painting is to canvas. Others engrave theirs on it, sink it into it, or detach it from it by giving it a relief that makes it stand out completely. They are sculptors. These are particularly suited to expressing thoughts that must be known to all, offered to all, and exposed, as in a public square, to universal attention. Of this kind are laws, inscriptions, maxims, proverbs—in a word, everything that among the ancients could be called nomes, and everything that among the moderns belongs to the sententious genre.
Morality and metaphysics: geometry and mechanics.
Sacred language. In what way it must be hieroglyphic. That all its words must have a character of recess or relief, of chasing or sculpture. White and black, empty and full, suit it. Everything in it must be juxtaposed and united, but separated by intervals.
Metaphysics. Necessary to the mind of the thinking man. If, then, he is forbidden the subjects where it [is] well placed, he abuses it. He carries it over and applies it to subjects not made for it, any more than it was made for them.
The mind loves rungs and ladders.