Plato. From this man’s writings there rises I know not what [intellectual] vapor that... etc. The mind swims in its vague apprehensions.

“Harshness of manners (says Plato) makes a house solitary.” [In] his letter to Dion, the first.) Amiability and a good welcome are an invitation [card] that circulates all year.

Dion wrote to Perdiccas: “Plato was born too late for the [Athenians]. They could offer him to counsel and govern only a people grown old [in] perverse habits, a spoiled, flattered, hardened, [incorrigible] people.” Wretched the sage who would live in such a state; he would be [deprived] of the greatest of all pleasures, that of loving and esteeming [the] multitude, that is to say, the human race. The vices of kings give great men holy and lively angers; but those of the people afflict [him], when this people is its own master and one can [blame] only it for its misfortunes and its faults.

June […]0.

That the soul is a mirror in which are reflected images, [species] or ideas, notions in short, of objects it cannot see and [that] it must not be entirely ignorant of.

That it is a rule ruled by a superior rule that touches it [and] models it, but from which it cannot depart either by excess or by [deficiency].

God touches us, or touches upon us, at all our points, as [light] and as rule.

June 12.

Natural light. A great phrase that holds a great meaning. Its necessity, equal to that of the sun itself. The name “sun of minds” has been perfectly imagined and applied. Every day, experience increasingly demonstrates its truth and exactness to the observer of others and of oneself.

June 15.

— [they] have treated better than we this part of the arts that contributes to domestic happiness. Their prints interest both the soul and the eyes. The decoration in them is moral.

June 16.

When men have no affairs, two things take their place: their imagination or their humor. Good humor especially is fertile in smiling ideas, in prospects, in hopes, in inventions and in expedients for pleasure.

Good humor in man is to pleasures what a fine imagination is to the fine arts: it delights in them, it loves them, it multiplies them, it creates them.

June 17.

Having found nothing worth more than the void, he leaves the space vacant.