July 21.

History. Peoples who play a role in it. The pleasure we take in watching them seduces us and leads us astray, inspiring in us almost the desire to act as they do. If we are wise, let us treat them like those actors whose talent we [admire], but whose profession we despise. What grave man would want to be Talma or even Lekain? In aspiring to a career at the rostrum, one aspires to the profession of actor.

Those Greeks and those Romans, great personages indeed. But in admiring their actions and their words, their gestures and their attitudes, let us not envy their lot, let us not aspire to make ourselves a history that makes us resemble them. Let us treat them like those actors whose performance we love, but whose profession we do not love.

Do you know what you desire without knowing it in the establishment of a legislative body! You desire a theater there and you want to make yourself an actor.

July 23.

The happiness of the wicked is to contemplate evil. The ambition of the mischievous or the malicious is to discover it: I mean to perceive it first. The ill-disposed occupy themselves with making it known, with spreading it.

What do the wise and good people, who live under the rule of reason and are slaves to duty, gain from these freedoms? Perhaps what the wise man and the good man can never permit themselves ought not to be permitted to anyone.

July 24.

To know how to distinguish clearly soul and body, God and the world, the model and the work, arrangement and law, actions and the rule. To know among natures those Above, the one below and those in the middle. Whoever knows these things knows enough and even much.

Holiness. Holiness must indeed exist somewhere. For it to exist, there must be some secluded places.

For there must be hearths; that alone preserves the fires.

If some piety is not carried to its furthest limit and, so to speak, to excess, there will be few pieties. And so with the other virtues.

July 25.

All brilliance comes from some reflection.