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The Bible is to religions what the Iliad is to poetry.
—and draw from this book a wisdom that is not in it.
August.
With candles one can do without the sun, but one is not so delightfully lit. With morality one can do without religion, but one is not so happy in virtue. Besides, just as without the sun there would be no fire, no light on earth, so without religions we would have had no morality.
Tell me what is happening on earth.
August 7.
Errors of mind alone have caused all the ills of the age. The most obstinate have been the most villainous.
August 8.
These philosophers are all merely surgeons.
August 8–9, Tuesday.
The world is a world through its form; in its substance it is nothing but a grain of matter. (See above: blown matter.)
By drawing his breath back into himself and deflating its volume, the creator can therefore easily destroy it. The universe, on this hypothesis, would have neither debris nor ruins. It would become again what it was before time: a flattened grain of metal (see above) and an atom in the void.—This world is only a large balloon.
Friday, August 11.
They regarded darkness as a canvas ready to receive the colors light would give it; silence as a great void ready to be filled with sounds; water as a fluid paste ready to absorb flavors (See ocellus, page 40.)
August 12.
And because nothing is useless and nothing fails to serve all its uses (among the things human providence does not govern), rumors concerning the dead also have their usefulness for their punishment or reward; but for this, must they not be capable of being heard by these spirits deprived of hearing?
The stiff style.—Words harsh in meaning and harmony.—When language (in books) has no pomp or harmony (often it should have none), it must have cadence, or unction, abandon, outpouring, flow and swell (floating), so to speak, as clouds have in the air.
Undulation, undulating style
Plato. His language always takes its color from the splendor of his thought. Its brilliance is born of his sublimity.
The barbarians with short hair and the barbarians with long hair formed two great divisions in ancient geography.
Plato. You put figures in place of his images.