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A book must be filled with human things — or the style of a book must be drawn from human things.
All these ancients (I mean the Greeks) had much less movement in their minds than we do. They would have thought they were sinning against propriety if they had shown as much. Thus their books and their statues offer perpetual models of moderation.
Almost genius, Chateaubriand says. Extreme goodness is true genius.
How often (in beautiful expressions especially) do we speak better than we think; and also speak truth without knowing it.
In Plato, Socrates sometimes and too often shows himself a philosopher by trade, instead of being content to be one by nature and by virtue.
March 6.
— He has put more than himself into his work. And then...
When one has made a work, even when it is well made in all its parts, one very difficult thing still remains to be done. And what is that? It is to put everywhere on its surface a varnish of ease and an air of pleasure that hides from the reader and spares him all the pains one has taken.
Through love, through respect, through understanding of order: that is true virtue.
To be virtuous by calculation is the virtue of vice.
Declamation. Declamation of mind, declamation of style. Let us admit it, there is some sort of declamation wherever words contain something like a burst of voice.
— And such a style is more like what is body than what is spirit. What, then, must one do? What one does with marble and stone: arrange columns, open spaces for light.
As for you, XXX, who are fluid...