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October 14.
Liquid and flowing words are the most beautiful and the best, if one considers language as music. But if you consider it as painting, there are rough words that are very good, for they make a stroke.
To mingle the appearance of some temper with ideas that are too fine. This gives them a kind of body. Sometimes movement is enough to make the figure.
That the folds in linen make an ornament, an adornment of it.
They think only of art and do not perceive nature, I mean the extraordinary talent sometimes hidden in a work that is badly made.
October […]7.
To imitate (the ancients used to say). But above all the poet, and indeed every writer, must imitate man. Persuaded, in everything he depicts.
October […]8.
Polish preserves works, I used to say. But “the mosses of time efface it,” as Mr. B. says very well. Yet it is very true that it preserves them by leaving no purchase to several other causes of destruction.
When I break the windowpanes, I want people to be tempted to pay me for them.
October 19.
It was in the order of heavenly providence to bring models into existence so that the literary world itself might have its beauty. These models have existed.
Let us write that “sooner or later the good prosper,” reversing the maxim that says “sooner or later the wicked are punished,” so that hope may join fear in commending virtue to us.
October 20.
That is because one finds there (in Balzac’s letters) a perfection useless to this genre and which no one wants for himself, for it would be too laborious for everyone. But if you consider them as pieces of eloquence (I mean eloquence in familiarity)...
There are opinions that come from the heart. Whoever has no fixed opinion has no constant feelings.
Words of a man who has a heart and has no head.