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The maxim and the lesson. One measures everything by the maxim and the other everything by the lesson.
October 5.
Man inhabits, strictly speaking, only his head and his heart. All the places that are not there may be before his eyes, beside him, and beneath his feet: he is not in them.
October 9.
As in new soil. But when the surface is worn out, one must turn over the ground beneath. And minds are like fields. In some, what is best is the surface; in others it is the ground beneath, at a great depth.
I have no surface left.
Only the colossal mind is loved now.
Some hatred made him produce all his works. — Or some contempt.
October 11.
— He had the talents that bring fame; but he did not have the passions that make men hungry for it.
October 14.
Reason. To apply it to moral things. It was given to us for this purpose; that is its legitimate use.
October 15.
To bring the vulgarities of familiarity into noble style, as the Jesuits do in their histories and Mme Dacier in her Homer, although both are excessive; Balzac did better when he introduced the pomp and heights of noble style into familiar style.
October 26.
Of those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.
In such a case, our duty is not to be able, but to try; that is to say, we are obliged to undertake, not to succeed.
They have left the instrument its dimensions, but have taken away its strings (in tragedy). They play fairly beautiful tunes on the cauldron. — And their very song is written rather than notated. A sort of bare bass, spoken verse.
Analyzed light. That is to say, they discovered a means of depriving it of its beauty. And this supposed analysis of light is at bottom only an analysis of colors. The instrument substitutes one phenomenon for another. It produces an alteration in the organ that makes you believe the object is better known; but who tells you that what it shows is more real than what is seen with the naked eye, that the double eye sees better than the single eye, etc.? In producing a different illusion, you judge that this instrument... Besides, illusions are the truths of sight, and those that are universal and constant are the good ones or the best.