May 31.

(In Ginguen.) It is this struggle, this combat against difficulties that made the human mind strong. Strength is born of exercise, and exercise of obstacle. The mind makes obstacles for itself when it has none and wishes to develop itself. Thus the Greeks, for whom the past was a blank tablet, a level ground, first invented their versification, and then their dialectic, their rhetoric, that is to say, fetters on reason, on mind and on speech, to make their mind agile, their reason penetrating and their style perfect. The Hebrews invented their concisions. — And thus, in the ancient republics, the work being done by slaves, the citizens, to avoid being enervated by softness, introduced wrestling, the cestus, pugilism. In praising etc. you exhort minds to softness, to sybaritism.

June 16.

They dared to write these words: “Sixty years of philosophy and thirty years of revolution have forever uprooted religious opinions in France.”

July 25.

Nothing makes man small like small pleasures.

July 30.

Of silence and obscurity around laws.

Sacrificed by their death; — how many others by their life?

Innocence has its compensations

One does not think of the two lives.

August.

Balzac. He overshoots the goal, but he leads to it. And it is entirely up to the reader to stop there, although the author goes beyond.

August 20.

Corneille. People reproach him for his great words and his great sentiments. But to raise ourselves and to avoid being soiled by the basenesses of the earth, we need stilts in everything, even if they are only the height or thickness of a sole.

September 13.

Truth and measure, exactness, finally, but an adorned exactness, in words and in ideas, in turns of phrase and even in transitions.

September 27.

(Villeneuve.) — The men fitted to give a new lineage beautiful beginnings.

October 20.

In all things and between all things there are limbos, in-between spaces; even between verse and prose; between poetry and simple eloquence, between the careless and the careful, the artificial and the natural, the ordinary and the singular.