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June 5.
(On the Essay on the Beautiful, by Father André.) I. When someone is asked: what is the beautiful? he naturally turns inward and seeks the feelings he experiences on seeing what is beautiful, more inclined to define the beautiful by the constant impression it produces than by the various sights it can offer. That is the mind’s involuntary and necessary procedure: and that is the path one should follow and keep to in this kind of inquiry.
II. It is not the idea of the beautiful, but the idea of the feeling that the beautiful invariably makes one experience, that is fixed and constant in minds.
III. As for the idea of the beautiful in itself, there are only two things one can picture of it, and constantly does picture: clarity and splendor, the brilliantly luminous, that is, what is most like the divine.
July 1.
The common (in the arts) is what speaks only to the senses. The coarse is what speaks only to the lower senses.
July 2.
One fears having and showing a small mind, and does not fear having and showing a small heart.
Sunday, July 7.
It is necessary for men to agree among themselves that this or that is true, that this or that is beautiful.
We always hate the pleasures we do not wish to love. Hatred in this case is a support our weakness gives itself.
July 3.
Our faults make us attentive to those of others. Constantly comparing ourselves with them, we do not think of the sides they do not have in common with us.
July 9.
One ruins one’s mind by writing too much. — One rusts it by not writing.
July 13.
It is scarcely through anything but the face that one is oneself. And a woman’s naked body shows her sex more than her person. One no longer thinks of the face of the woman whose naked body one sees. Clothes therefore set off the face. The person is properly in the face; only the species is in the rest.
July 19.
... like children’s hair, which is always a color that is going to change.
Truths for the soul, truths for the mind, make two.
[God] made the world. And even if he had not made it and had made only our souls? It is not the author of the whole, it is the creator of minds, the master of our destinies, whom we are above all inclined and bound to adore.
July 20.
Logic too has its illusions, but they are firmer.