The air was its hearing and its rays its eyes or its gazes (which [reach] everything).

“A man who practices virtue” (says Mme de Motteville). One must practice virtue, even when one does not possess it. That is to say, to speak as Mme de Motteville does, “practice it through one’s will and against one’s inclination.” That is very well said.

July 21.

Things that depend on the mind’s light can be proved to no man except through the light he has.

July 22.

Grave thoughts and serious thoughts. The banker, the mere financier, has many of the latter; the moralist many of the others.

One can speak to great princes of their glory, for that is their honor; and to subordinates of their honor, for that is their glory. When one displaces these words, the misuse one makes of them renders them ridiculous.

July 27.

One must adorn points of view.

To thank heaven when it gives us beautiful dreams.

July 28.

Form contains matter as the hoop contains the barrel. (Entelechy, or intimate, constitutive form.)

Porphyry and Iamblichus, Platonists by profession, through study and through will. But they were not so through necessity, through character, through nature. The only born Platonist whose books we possess was a modern, and he was Marsilio Ficino. But he had Platonic understanding more than Platonic imagination.

August 1.

They sang very well; but they all seemed inspired by the Pierides. Voltaire celebrated the evils of religion; Jean-Jacques, society’s crimes; Buffon, the power of movement and space, chaos; Montesquieu made legislation into a machine. And their imitators, — the year 2000, ruins, physiological morality.

August 3.

Only the old priest and those who resemble him are made happy by old age.

Order is to arrangement what the soul is to the body, what spirit is to matter. Arrangement without order is a body without a soul.