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For, my dear Panson, nature, wishing man to love them, made everything that indicates their sex beautiful in women. But as she wished, on the contrary, to make women restrained, she made everything that announces man’s sex repellent, such as the beard, etc., thus arranging all things so that women could love for pleasure only what they had first loved out of duty. Moreover, the necessity of clothing themselves was imposed on them by the elements and by intelligence: for they understood that in nakedness there were places that were not beautiful. “You make him naked (they said to Prometheus”. What does it matter (he said) if I give him the ingenuity to clothe himself.” Thus nakedness is a sign of stupidity among savage peoples and of the depravity of their nature among civilized peoples.
March 15.
Before using a beautiful word, make a place for it. There must be air before a façade. An entablature placed in the middle of a wall shows more of a destruction there than a construction.
March 16.
To love religion as a kind of homeland and nurse. She has suckled our virtues, she has shown us heaven. She taught us to walk in the paths of our duties.
March 19.
There is a way of taking and turning words and thoughts that makes them easier to bend and to use. The Greeks excelled at it.
March 20.
Plato had a winged genius. The observer, with eyes fixed on things, who wishes to penetrate their substance and not their causes, is more like those gnomes that dwell in the depths. He is earthly and, in a sense, more a friend of treasures than of beauty.
England: passionate government.
March 21.
— Yes, when one makes prose without knowing it, like Mr. Jourdain, and the best one has to say in the day is this: Nicole, give me my slippers and bring me my nightcap.
When the mind has acquired the habit of expressing nothing without having reflected on the object and on the expression; when this habit has given us, as our first impulse, that of suspending our operation to make it surer; when, finally, one has grown accustomed to waiting for it and letting the ideas of things come peacefully from things to us... All that (one will say) is only a habit. One is right. But this habit, changed into nature, is indestructible. And it has its uses. It is troublesome for the author, but very advantageous to the work, and consequently to the reader.
... and that I brood over my little eggs, my nest of birds; for my thoughts and my words have wings.
The human mind has the same powers in every century, but not the same ingenuity and fortunate directions.
— in those times when, to express oneself well, one must speak as others do not speak.
March 22.
A. One finds the world depicted in the epic poem alone. B. Why? A. Because only there does one find the heavens, the earth, and the underworld. Now these are the three great divisions of the world in its entirety; and whoever has never occupied his thoughts with these three places leaves life without even having imagined what the world is.