February […].

Religions. All are good, and the best for each man is the one he has. But the most beautiful is indisputably this one.

February 3.

Plato. One must breathe him, so to speak, and not feed on him.

“How much more dangerous it is to have no religion than to have a bad one” says d’Aguesseau (Life of his father).

February 5.

Give what is frivolous to what is frivolous and what is grave to what is grave, that is to say praise to wit and veneration to virtue.

Of expression. The street singer who sang so badly and charmed his listeners. It was because he had expression. One felt in his singing the emotion and pleasure he sincerely caused himself, and he communicated them.

Affectation. To affect is to wish to display what one does not have. A singer who pleases himself may fail to please because he charms only his vanity and does not sincerely charm himself. The same tones, the same gestures, the same words, the same turns of phrase that are an affectation in some are not so in others. To be natural in the arts is to be sincere.

The ignorant are the most sensitive to expression. It charms them as soon as it accords with the feeling of the person expressing himself. The learned want it to resemble what they themselves feel or think. The skillful who have preserved a naïve taste fit to discern the craftsman’s natural character in his work love expression wherever it [is] sincere, even when it runs counter to their habits or their choices.

February 6.

Naturalness that exposes itself to ridicule without foreseeing it is naïveté; if it foresees it and without fearing it, that is frankness. Those who have known how to preserve their own natural character whole are always struck and charmed by that of others, even if it should be opposed to their own. Thus they are always sensitive to expression.

Those who manifest only faults or acquired qualities, display and do not express.

As Mʳ de la Croix observed very well in today’s Journal de Paris, coarseness forgives only those vices that are refined.

Plato always soars. He never perches, never gains a foothold.

Those kinds of animals (which leave their young after birth because the young no longer need them) take as much care of the layette as others do of nursing.

Youth would have everything in the world be new, like itself. Old age loves what is ancient. One must love what is sensible.

... Like those shafts of bright light having suddenly entered a dark room.

February 7.

We cannot say anything without muddling and crumpling it. The Ancients, on the contrary, unfolded (and spread out) everything.