September […].

The comic arises from seriousness (the character’s seriousness). [Pathos] arises from patience or repose (the repose of the sufferer). [There] is therefore no comic without gravity, nor pathos without [moderation]. To be comic, the one who makes us laugh must not know he [is] laughable. To be moving, the one who weeps must not know of (or must [restrain]) his own tears. Someone who communicates his own laughter [is] merely amusing. Regnard is merry, Molière is comic. A servant [can] be amusing (see Scapin); his master must be comic (see [Argante]).

September […].

To be moving when one weeps, one must weep without [wishing] to and without knowing it.

September […].

“I have given my flowers and my fruit; I am now only a resounding trunk (a piece of [wood]). But whoever sits in my shade and [hears] me becomes wiser.”

The wisdom of young people (I mean their philosophical wisdom) [is] always folly in some respect, and in several. How could one keep reason’s balance amid [the] troubles of that age? How could one [have] an upright reason when the heart has so many inclinations and the [blood] so much turbulence and ardor?

The style of P[ascal]’s letters shows what his mind was like. The style [of] Mme de Sévigné’s letters shows what her disposition was like.

“To make oneself heard with pleasure and understood without difficulty.” In this, according to Pascal, consists all eloquence: [sound] eloquence, true eloquence, solid and always sufficient eloquence. One [must], moreover, “be right.”

September […]9.

... to attract attention and hold it; add: and satisfy it.

Pascal sought “turns... capable of striking the mind and engaging the heart” (p. xv) “confined himself to the essential and the simple natural” (ibid.) “composed his letters with incredible mental exertion, care and labor” (beginning with the sixth). “He sometimes spent twenty whole days on a single letter; he began some of them again as many as seven or eight times. They even say he reworked the eighteenth as many as thirteen times.” (p. xxi.)

The soul is formed from the repose of the mind, the affections (and even good taste) from the absence of fancies.

The attention one gives to the house and the furniture distracts from the master, and the temple distracts from the god.

I. A little of everything, nothing to one’s heart’s content: a great means of being moderate, of being wise, of being content.

II. Take care that your house always lacks something whose absence you do not feel too keenly and the desire for which is pleasant to you.

III. One must keep oneself in such a state and such a disposition that one can be neither sated nor insatiable.

IV. When one has everything, one is too full.

September 9.

A rule frees us from fancies, from the torments of uncertainty.