It costs nothing, they say, or costs little. But if it comes from a [mind] that has cost both nature and art a great deal, from a rare mind, […] can come only from it, is it worth less for that and is it less [precious]?

Paintings for show, noisy paintings. They amuse [inattention]. They furnish. They adorn. That is their merit.

[…]imanche, May 17.

This temperance in which virtue plays no part.

Talent is only a singularity, if in other respects...

Goodness of soul and greatness of soul. Superiority of nature.

May […]3.

Plato wished above all to be agreeable in his sphere.

(Today’s newspaper.) Voltaire. “He had more need of errors than of [enlightenment].” But he proscribed the errors that were useless to him, and spread [only] his own. The truths that served him were the [only] ones he respected.

Why Tartuffe is in fashion and in favor.

(Article A.) “Paid flatterers” (more numerous in the north than in the south). Apparently this is because the inhabitants of the south know better how to [flatter] themselves. They have a vanity that suffices for itself.

Among the Indians and at certain religious festivals, thieves punish their hands, liars punish their tongues, the [debauched] tear their loins or cut their foreheads to punish themselves for their pleasures or their evil thoughts. All this is [quite] respectable. But he makes one laugh at the torments of these fakirs who [serve] as their own persecutors and executioners “to arouse veneration” through “commiseration.” There is nothing celestial here. The pride of baseness and the ambition of nullity deserve only contempt and infamy. It is right to decry them. And yet [how much] prudence is necessary in such a matter! for if the extravagance of the false priest sustains the wisdom of the true devotee... And then an insult rashly offered to one religion is an insult offered to all, for all have among them some slight, necessary and inevitable resemblance.

— [they] see animalcules everywhere. They take everything that turns to be organized, and movement for life.

May 1.

Plato. There is in this man a light that is always ready to show itself and that never shows itself. We see it in his veins as in those of a pebble. One would have to rub his thoughts and strike them to make it burst forth from them. He piles up clouds that conceal a celestial fire. This celestial fire awaits the shock.

May 11.

Advantage of good company and the society of people of letters in Paris. Mediocre ideas are spent there in conversation; one keeps the exquisite ones to write them down. In this respect, conversation skims the mind... Conversation in Paris makes the mind boil and skims it. To skim one’s mind is to refine one’s taste.

For the observer and the connoisseur, there are remarkable sayings and thoughts everywhere, in the conversations of fools, in the most mediocre writings, etc. This circulates like gold coins, which everyone uses and whose brilliance, intrinsic value and beauty no one or almost no one notices.

One can make jewels from these coins; but who will know how to work them?

May 14.

[Servan.] Religion: ours through the eyes of faith, that of others through the eyes of reason. And this is very well done.