July 3.

Rousseau. “Too governed by his senses,” says one of his panegyrists, “and by his imagination,” he adds. It was indeed his imagination that directed him and his senses that directed his imagination, as his appetites directed his heart.

Good and evil in the moral world, pain and well-being in the sensible world, order and disorder in the intellectual world, error and truth in the scientific world, war and peace or agitation and rest in the political world, corruption and purity in the religious world: these are the six great oppositions. But we must observe that the good or evil of one of these six worlds is not always the good or evil of another. Thus well-being, which is the good of the sensible world, may not always be the good of the moral or religious world.

This line (the line of beauty) must unroll without breaking in our head, but the hand cannot trace it without interruption and without taking it up several times.

All that portion of mind or all those qualities of mind that one cannot have without an extraordinary soul is genius or partakes of genius.

It is people who make places.

July 4.

This remark by a woman of wit: “they have put science into little pots.”

Whenever we see a very beautiful thing, whether in art or in nature, “we think we see it less in reality than in a dream,” as Mʳ de Chateaubriand said of the Alhambra.

City of stone “in a landscape of stone” (by the same). And “rolling pebbles... waves of dust...” Etc.

Indeed, we think we are dreaming when we see a beautiful thing.

July 5.

Monosyllables. Fontanes forbids himself their use. Lafontaine knew how to make excellent use of them.

July 6.

If the mind likes to complete what it hears — and that — it is a pleasure it needs, unless, to compensate it, we give it something perfect to admire. Thus not everything in the mediocre should be finished, nor should anything in the excellent be missing, because in this latter case, no one finding anything to supply, a useless pain would result.

— And Corneille. How vigorously he speaks of his old age!

July 10.

Manner and taste. Differences. For example, the writers of the last century did not have a beautiful manner, but they had a very wise taste; they fitted what they said well together.

July 13.

— There is a rightness in his mind that is rigid and cannot bend to all these soft truths...