May 3.

First “constitute” the villages, the market towns, the towns, the provinces, etc. Occupy yourselves with improving the state of souls.

We are only skeletons covered with flesh and skin.

May 4.

It is to imagination that great truths are revealed: for example, providence, its course, its designs, which escape our judgment—imagination sees them.

Imagination, in what is best in it, is the understanding of invisible things, the faculty of representing them to oneself.

May 7.

Yes; I willingly put out (he said) conflagrations and stinking torches.

Only the wisest; and judged such, not by the people but by the prince, who has a great interest in not being mistaken.

If one alone is always wiser than several...

To seek that style which always makes one perceive or discover more meaning than it explicitly has.

May 8.

A soul made for one temperament and that would govern another.

Without this inequality of Souls (animating such diverse bodies), there would no longer be uniform duties (unless one admits inequalities of graces or assistances).

One must go to heaven. There, in their types, are all things, all truths, all pleasures of which we have here only the shadows.

The type, the imprint, and the image in the mind. The image (because of its place) is more beautiful than the imprint (because of its own); but the divine idea is more beautiful than the type itself, which is more beautiful than all the rest.

Each has his path traced out, the one on which he finds himself upon entering life; he must follow it, unless heaven itself makes us enter another.

It is probable that the bird’s eye is gladdened by colors (those of flowers), by greenery and by the very brilliance of water.

May 10.

That sovereignty belongs to God and to God alone. He sets it in place, he maintains it, he withdraws it, he suspends it, and he moves it about as he pleases.