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April 28.
Perhaps it is true to say that our ideas deceive us less than our judgments.
How high can the number of good books that can be made in a language rise?
May 1.
Bossuet himself had only the mind of his time (read Balzac’s Prince). And Newton did no more than find the word that the school was seeking when he was born (read the natural philosophers and mathematicians of the century before him).
May 3.
Political feelings. — In Montesquieu, for example, there are ideas and there are no political feelings. Yet it is through political feelings alone that states have a soul and life. Without them, empires have only a movement whose spring is not within them: machines worked by a crank.
One learns more about being a king from a page of the Prince than from the four volumes of The Spirit of Laws.
Voltaire. His mind excelled through its movements.
May 6.
Balzac. In his portraits, everything is face and everything is visage.
May 7.
Wherever there is no order and harmony, the mark of God is no longer there; there is desert, and there has been degradation.
The human mind. It is a subtle thing and loves subtleties. — All causes are subtle, and only effects are palpable.
(At Les Joliaux). ... and transmits feeling there like a divine dew with which the mind itself is moistened.
— As in apple trees. The colors of the tree’s blossom pass into the fruit.
... it is true that little attention is needed to understand it, but then again too little is needed.
The oven — introduced the vault.