“The supreme good is the beautiful,” Plato said. He thought that [in] everything beautiful there is a light or a knowledge mingled with [pleasure].

August […]9.

“Only what is always the [same], he said, is always true, and only what, being beautiful, is always like itself is always beautiful. One is therefore happy only through the knowledge and contemplation of what is immutable.” All this is good, but it says nothing to the heart. It would have been a thousand times quicker for him to say: “There is happiness only in a well-ordered soul.” There are therefore pleasures that are enemies of happiness, and perhaps sciences too, although […] said in his name: But in this mixture all kinds of knowledge are to be employed... pleasures, on the contrary, cannot all be admitted (See in Philebus.)

That: there is a philosophical expression just as there is a poetic expression.

In Plato there is more form than matter.

Of moral quadrature. And that pure ideas have a kind of angularity or mathematical roundness through which one glimpses their mutual fitness or unfitness, when one has inward eyes.

And, having climbed to the summit, he longs to descend.

A carpenter astride a roof, when he has put the finishing touch to his work, probably supplied this beautiful image to Corneille.

If poetry borrowed a beautiful image from the carpenter, he in turn borrows a beautiful word from politics: does he not say that he crowns his building?

August 30.

To follow the same road as one’s fathers in going to heaven, so as to dwell there at the same point. The same journey, the same goal, the same road, to arrive at the same lodging.

To leave each person his measure of mind, his character and his temperament, merely perfecting them. Those born delicate must live delicate but healthy, those born robust must live robust but temperate, those with lively minds must keep their wings, the others must keep their feet in all their breadth and thickness, but walk straight and without heaviness. Finally, the body should be left with neither the strength that hardens the soul nor the excessive susceptibility that would weaken it. For there is a degree of strength that produces insensibility; irritability carried to excess is no better. “Wooden nerves,” Chateaubriand said very well. Nor must they be made of wool or cotton. Nothing suits the mind but its natural gait, whence its ease, its grace and all its facilities, whether real or apparent. Everything that forces it upward harms it; to strain its springs is to destroy it. Finally, finally, we all carry certain signs of our destinations; we must not erase them, we must follow them: otherwise we shall inevitably have a false and unhappy destiny. To alter or make other, to destroy the natural self, is in education the worst of errors.

Neither love, nor friendship, nor respect, nor admiration, nor gratitude, nor the most deserved and most absolute devotion should deprive us of conscience or the discernment of good and evil. [That is] a possession we are forbidden to sell and that nothing [could] pay for.

God. The child believes him like man; the practiced man [believes] him like light, which is very little progress.

There is more geometry and more [mechanics] in these explanations, but no more truth and much less [verisimilitude].

August […].

To write. To write well, one needs a natural facility and an acquired [difficulty] — or otherwise — to write easily by nature and with [difficulty] through art (through reflection and through good taste, etc.).