Degenerated “through cultivation.” There is also degeneration through non-cultivation. But that is not the worse kind: it comes from the soil; the other is more irremediable, for the evil is in the seed.

January 28.

Savage peoples live under the empire of needs, barbarous peoples under the empire of passions, polished peoples under the empire of ideas, degenerate peoples under the empire of pleasures; degraded, debased and unhappy peoples under the empire of the needs, passions, ideas, pleasures and whims of one man or a small number of men. (See Ancillon.)

March 9.

Free souls, much rather than free men! Moral freedom is the only important one, the only necessary one; and the other is good and useful only insofar as it favors that one.

March 18.

There were evils, doubtless, but they did not come from the will of men or from a known will. They were neither ordained nor approved.

March 20.

Peoples who have lost virtue and true knowledge can no longer recover them. No one, except the truly wise, wishes to go backward, even to take the right road again.

March 27.

Space offers the mind a length and a breadth without [depth], and a continuity without consistency, or at least without [impenetrability] — and perhaps is only that — and why not?

Not all the dimensions of body could suit place; [and] place was necessary. Space is the common place in which all [places] and all bodies are contained. There therefore had to be [space]: space exists because it was necessary; necessary for [movements], for existences, for placements and displacements. Air is [the] image of space.

Of those who leave school and Of those who know how to leave [their] knowledge.

March […]0.

Inamabilis unda coërcet. (Virgil). Inamabilis unda! There are many waves or waters of this kind. Every water that is not [transparent], every stream that does not flow! The Bièvre is inamabilis.

Good-natured, and very good-natured; but without enough goodness for [so much] good nature. One ought to be as good-natured as one is a good man, [as] much a good man as good-natured; and there should be such a correspondence between these qualities that the conversion between these epithets could be made perfectly, with truth and exactness.

Faults that do not hurt can irritate only malice.

Balzac. His emphasis is often a game, and indeed is never anything but a game, for he is never its dupe. Those who censure it gravely and bitterly are people who do not understand [serious] joking and cannot distinguish hyperbole from exaggeration, or emphasis from swelling, and a man’s rhetoric from the sincerity of his character. Hyperbole is a figure; emphasis is like a tone of voice, a sound; swelling is a disease and exaggeration a vice in judgment, in feeling, in taste. The rest belongs to art, not to the artist. And the beginning of art and the novelty of labor and its works, required such a procedure.