December 5.

J.-J. Rousseau. If one stripped his thoughts of their pomp, if one wiped their colors away, if one removed, so to speak, the flesh and blood found in them, etc. — “take away his theater” (Boileau).

December 4.

Of enlightened souls and bodies that divine light penetrates to reach the soul.

Indeed, these English gardens are not (and cannot be) in accord with architecture properly so called.

December 5.

(Even admitting Malebranche’s suppositions) how many truths, and above all how many practical truths, are taught us by the errors of the senses! (the dog, the poor man, the child.)

That physics which speaks only of disasters that resemble disorders.

December 7.

It is in the order of things that an inevitable penalty should follow a voluntary fault.

Oh, how little it takes to keep a verse, a poem, a print, a painting, a stroke, a face, a speech, a word, an accent, a gesture, a note, etc., from being touching! (or from reaching).

For example, the stiffness of the principal figure in the Ugolino and the Marius, the nose in Peters’s Hebe, the dryness of the point in those burin engravings.

To succeed in touching, there must be neither too much point, for one flees it, nor too little, for one does not follow it. In the end, nothing that [has] either too many rough edges or too much covering can touch.

December 8.

To touch or reach. — Everything that puts some distance between an object and us, everything that makes us draw inward or everything that makes the stroke too thick, makes it blunt, round or square—in a word, not very insinuating; finally, everything that hinders reception and opening on the one hand, approach, access and penetration on the other, all this, I say, prevents it from being touching.

To touch or reach. To reach taste, to reach the soul; to touch the heart, to touch the senses; or to enter the mind, satisfy reason, etc. To satisfy reason, enchant attention and delight taste.

Sometimes, to arouse interest, all that is needed is a subject, and not to distort its nature. Even weakly depicted and in a mediocre light, if it is touching in itself and is not masked or too disfigured, it touches.

His Ugolino is a bronze figure, and in painting bronze never touches. Even in sculpture, it is not. the features and other extremities of the bronze figure that touch us, but the air that outlines it and seems to soften it.

December 9.

If water bends a stick, my reason straightens it.

Their reason straightens nothing.

One deprives storms of one of their uses by depriving men of the religious fear they naturally have of them everywhere.