Rivarol. His taste and imagination, by holding him within the limits of what can please, saved his mind from many deviations. Thus his expression is ordinarily better and sounder than his opinions.

Fénelon. He really has too little art; and, as has been observed, he more often lets his thought fall than brings it to an end. Nothing in him is molded enough.

Address to one who has killed himself. — You have rejected life, and we exclude you from the common burial place. Heaven may have forgiven your soul, but our laws will not forgive your body. Well then, let it be punished for having struck itself, and as it struck itself a mortal blow, let it be shamefully and forever relegated among the bodies of criminals.

There are men whose words are playful and whose actions are serious. Good soldiers usually have this character.

March 6.

The word Soul is transparent; the word feeling is not. It attracts attention, it is true, but holds it so firmly that it does not let it pass beyond. That is enough to exclude it and to admit the word soul in explaining man. Rivarolle (sic) was mistaken and deceived himself. Clear ideas let all the others be seen, instead of masking them by occupying attention with themselves alone. This word feeling interests, but it does not illuminate and clarifies nothing.

Rivarol (in his preliminary discourse). He embroiders obscurities. And, by covering the simplicity of these questions with his filigrees... by admitting Condillac’s abstractions as solid, he took a fog for a land.

Rivarolle had emerged from neither the spirit nor the doctrine of this century. He only made changes within it.

This century. A true Leviathan among centuries, which wished to devour them all, had colossal proportions in all its ambitions. Filled with gigantic pride and thereby an enemy of the gods.

— of the virtues [they] have only their ideas. Satisfied if they judge them well, and believing themselves worthy of esteem when they know how to blame.

Let them give us, then, a philosophy that is better and more effective than religions.

The rich ought to leave pleasures to the poor, keeping the virtues for themselves.

See Rivarol, Discourse on the Nature of Language, and everything he says about feeling. The ancients expressed themselves better and more clearly by placing between the body and the immortal soul (the intellect) a sensitive soul. — And what he calls feeling can produce only ardors. Another faculty, or rather another substance, is needed to produce and spread light. — And also, if feeling is enough to guide oneself and to guide others, [it] is not enough to enlighten them.

The expression “to live beneath the mask”; add: and to die there.