Each principle of life is calculated for a fixed time. Interrupted or stopped. But even in this case it has served to act with more force. As a dart launched to go beyond strikes the target more forcibly.

Settled things — or — Questions whose settlement is a fact one must know.

He is an ambitious man, which is no evil; but he has the character of one, which is no good.

Scents are like the souls of flowers. They may be perceptible even in the land of shades.

No doubt it was philosophy that caused the Revolution. But what caused philosophy. It was theological arrogance.

July […].

Just as there are men who have more memory than judgment, there are some who have, in a sense, more thoughts than mind. Thus they can neither harness them nor drive them. Others have too few thoughts for their mind, which wastes away from boredom unless trifles cheer it. Still others have too many thoughts for their age or their health, and these torment them.

He is a grave child, a judicious and decided pupil.

“That is leaving the question,” you say? Yes, but it is not leaving the subject. Now it is the subject that matters in the question.

Except for a few representations where mediocrity suffices for use (as in church paintings, for example), all the rest is useless in the arts if supreme beauty is not found there.

To sculpture, the graceful: strength is sufficiently present in its material.

Even the pun is a kind of poetry: it has its play.

In literature and in established judgments of authors, as in everything else, there are more agreed opinions and settled things than truths.

July 10.

Of those in whom the imaginative faculty (an animal faculty very different from imagination, an intellectual faculty) predominates. Imagination is the mind’s imaginative faculty. Some children have much imaginative faculty without having imagination. The imaginative faculty is struck. It is passive. Imagination is active, creative.