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Images have had a great influence upon realities.
February 4.
An actor who has the air of a hideous reality.
February 7.
We smile with our lips and laugh with our teeth.
The skeleton of the human head resting on the upper jaw presents an air of gravity that does not repel. If it rests on both jaws, the sight is hideous, dreadful: these bones seem to laugh.
These ideas (you say) come from education. I agree. But education—where does it come from? It comes from the opinions of educators. But the opinions of educators? When they are found to be the same in every age and every country, where can they come from but nature? And if they were not innate, how could they have entered so many minds?
These opinions, uncertain in our own eyes, which we can approach like floating islands only with little security in this ocean where we are.
February 12.
There are paintings that enter the imagination; there are others of which one may say that the imagination enters them. Just as there are objects that enter, so to speak, the eyes, and others into which our gaze enters and delights in penetrating.
February 14.
The whole world is only gauze. Iron itself, through its porosity, is only crêpe.
February 17.
There are things that man by his nature can know only indefinitely, and great minds are content to have indefinite notions of them. But vulgar minds are not content with this. For their peace of mind, they must forge for themselves, or be offered, fixed and determinate ideas about those very objects where all precision is error. These common minds have no wings. They cannot sustain themselves in anything that is mere space. They need supports, fables, idols, lies. Lie to them, then, and do not deceive them.
February 18.
The body is a mold that gives form to the soul.
February 21.
The Judœa capta medal. She is neither beneath the sword nor in chains. The ancients took good care not to present distressing objects in their emblems. (To be examined.)
To the one who draws the line from the point. = The line is in the point as the armful of thread is in a ball.
Sovereignty. The idea this word seeks to express cannot present itself clearly to the mind unless the correlative it presupposes is expressed or understood at the same time. When one says that a people is sovereign, one says nothing clear unless one means that it commands other peoples and is their King. To be sovereign or master of oneself is intelligible in morals and when it is a question of the dominion an individual can exercise over his passions. But in politics this word means nothing except in extraordinary cases.