Of truth concentrated, or reduced in its expression to little space, to few words; but clear as thin films.

Or: luminous but impalpable, accessible to our insights but inaccessible to our proofs; for the same reason it is inaccessible to all our discussions.

Slander and condemnation without examination (a principle of government).

The regicides who draw us into their cause.

Truth. I. To knead it, mold it and impress a form upon it. II. To [extract] from it only the light (the essence) and make it impalpable (and [perhaps], by that very fact, unalterable). III. To confine oneself to its simple [statement], and draw the consequences.

The first manner contains it whole, with its efficacies. The [second] preserves it. The third introduces some [good] effects of it into life, but does not make it seen and consequently leaves it [unknown]: one then follows it as a blind person.

Noise is the sound of bodies that are not sonorous, or comes from the coming together of bad sounds (there are bad sounds) or of sounds in discord.

Elegance comes from clarity in forms: clarity that makes them easy to grasp; to grasp and even to count. To maintain in oneself the habit of clarity.

To reduce, as they say, to elegant formulas.

Of achromatic clarity. It rarely has an object, at least a real one.

Nothing is so subtle as germs. And yet nothing is so real; and what am I saying? They are the cause of all realities.

The essence, not merely supposed, not merely apparent, not imaginary, but true.

Of the need to admire (common to certain women in literary ages), and which is an alteration of the need to love.

— reduced to such a degree of tenuity (or thinning) that...

Plato, Xenophon and the other writers of Socrates’ school. They have the evolutions of birds’ flight; they make long circuits; they embrace much space; they circle for a long time around the point where they wish to alight and which they always keep in view; they swoop down upon it. It is they who build labyrinths, but labyrinths in the air. They use few figurative or colored words; on the contrary, they choose them simple and common, precisely because the idea they use them to trace is itself a great and long figure. By imagining the wake left in the air by the flight of these birds that amuse themselves by rising, descending, gliding and wheeling, one would have an idea of what I have called the evolutions of their mind and their style. (Perpetual suspension.)

May 1.

One performs experiments in physics at will. But the others can only be perceived, without its being in our power to verify them by repeating them.