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April 19.
I have dreams more amorous than my actions have ever been.
April 20.
The shepherd’s dog. I used to say: “the pleasure of exercising one’s talent.” I add: “the pleasure of playing the master,” which at its source is the pleasure of establishing order as one conceives it.
April 21.
Truth is for the mind precisely what light is for the eyes. Certainty is for opinion what firm, solid ground is for the feet. Doubt is a state of swaying or fluctuation.
In morals, in literature, errors of optics are produced by a lack of reflection.
April 22.
Meaning makes harmony. And, for example, for this sentence: “the report of your cannons wakes the dead,” substitute this one: “The report of your cannons wakes the ports.” And see how the first has a reverberation that the second lacks! That is because in the latter everything is vaguer and vaster for the attention, and in the former everything is more circumscribed. The bounds of reality are there. A truer noise is made there, but there is less echo; and there is less echo because there is less space.
And just as everything sonorous seems to have a kind of clarity, so too all words with a clear meaning seem to have a kind of sound. But distinguish well between what is clear and what is merely intelligible.
April 23.
A judgment is a fact one makes oneself and that enriches one in no way.
Genius is the aptitude for seeing invisible things, moving intangible things, painting things that have no features.
... to picture spirits to oneself.
“She has lived, Mirtho the young Tarentine.”
That: songs must be sacred.
Whether there is in us some innate notion of the beautiful. — And that: most men judge it only through a certain admiration mingled with joy; and, consequently, through pleasure or feeling more than through an idea. That: this idea is of another life — and that nevertheless, etc. Everything that depicts a beautiful soul etc.
That means that we all have an inward moral sense, but not an inward poetic sense.
April 24.
Balzac, Lemaître, Patru, etc. have a character in their style that is more contemplative than animated. Plato might not have thought little of them, he who held Isocrates in such esteem.