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April 21.
Mr. Dubut’s saying: “Love is a curiosity and constancy a laziness.” That resembles the love and constancy of many people.
Times when there are no rules: even good people are worth less in them. Life then is a bridge without parapets, from which the impetuous fling themselves into vice when they wish and drunken people without wishing to. One is better than oneself in good times and worse than oneself in bad times.
On patience. Necessary to have pleasure when reading (or looking), and to be right when judging, and to do well when acting, whether one wishes to invent or to put into practice.
It may be pardonable to judge the living with our mood because they are living. But one may judge the dead only with our reason because they are dead. Moreover, having become immortal, they can now be measured only with an immortal rule, which is that of justice.
To proceed by analysis requires a slowness and patience of which not all good minds are capable. To proceed by synthesis requires a swiftness of observation and a power of penetration of which not everyone is capable. One can be trained in analysis through examples, but one cannot learn synthesis. Whoever is not born capable of it does not become so. Analysis is convenient for all teachers. But it is not useful to all pupils. There are minds born for another gait. We hold them back; we dislocate them when we force these delays upon them.
April 22.
To make one’s moods the rule of one’s judgments, and one’s fancies the motive of one’s actions: horrible customs of the century.
April 21.
By taking for a quirk of mind what is only a quirk of opinion, by taking for a fault of character what is only a fault of mood, by judging a man from a remark, a life from a deed, a soul from an impulse when all this is irregular, we do much harm and many injustices.
April 22.
Even a critic must have kindness.
The verse recalled by Chateaubriand:
The cruel memory Will not let my sorrows ever end.
April 23.
Each spoke there of his art. The painter spoke of paintings, the priest of traditions, the scholar of ancient authors, the soldier of battles. It was then that society was an instructive school. — Of his art, not of his works; of famous paintings, not of his own. - And only as necessary and to the point. — Today the artist likes to speak of wars, the soldier of paintings, the learned man of new fashions, and the priest of little verses.
It is more to the century’s shame than to the books’ honor that novels exercise such an ascendancy over morals and habits.
The journalists (who have become) sprightly.