This stagnation poisons me. I stifle in calm water. Like the trout, I enjoy swimming upstream.

“A fine life is a thought conceived in youth and realized in maturity.”

I remember particularly what he said to me of America, which, he claimed “has no soul,” has not deserved to have one, for she has not yet “deigned to plunge into the abyss of suffering and sin.”

the best thing is to let the work compose itself and give itself its order, and above all not to force it. And I use this word likewise in the sense that horticulturists give it: forced cultivation is a cultivation that makes a plant blossom prematurely.

I believe that the major shortcomings of writers and artists today is impatience: if they knew how to wait, their subject would automatically compose itself slowly in their mind; by itself it would cast off the useless matter and everything that impedes it; it would grow like a tree whose leading branches are developed at the expense of . . . 

It would grow naturally.

I have always had more understanding, more memory, and more taste for natural history than for history. The fortuitous has always interested me less than the necessary, and it has always seemed to me that one could learn more from what is repeated every day than from what occurs but once. (External inevitability—intimate inevitability.)

I call “journalism” everything that will be less interesting tomorrow than today. How many great artists win their cases only on appeal!

Em. writes me: “I am greatly worried by the campaign of vilification opening up against you. Of course it is the force of your thought and its authority that has instigated this. Oh! if only you were invulnerable, I should not tremble. But you are vulnerable, and you know it; and I know it.”

Vulnerable . . . I am so, I was so, only through her. Since, it is all the same to me and I have ceased fearing anything. . . . What have I to lose that is still dear to me?

“False greatness is cold and inaccessible; aware of its weakness, it hides itself or at least does not reveal itself boldly, letting only enough of it to be seen as is necessary to impress and to keep from appearing what it really is: simply pettiness. True greatness is free, easy, and familiar, letting itself be touched and handled. It loses nothing from being seen at close range; the more it is known, the more it is admired; through kindness it stoops to the level of inferiors and effortlessly returns to its original position. At times it yields, neglects itself, gives up its advantages, always able to pick them up again and make the most of them. It can laugh, joke, and play, but always without loss of dignity. It is approached with freedom and restraint together; its character is noble and open, inspires respect and confidence, and makes princes appear to us as great and even very great without making us feel that we are small.”

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue in my case. But I must confess that there are moments, of late, when I feel mortally sad.

Never take advantage, for any new work, of the impetus from the preceding one.

Likewise, win over for each new work a new public.

“Bookish” is a reproach that is often direct at me; I lay myself open to it by my habit of always quoting those to whom my thought seems related. People think I took that thought from them; this is false; that thought came to me of itself; but I enjoy, and the more so the bolder the thought is, thinking that it has already inhabited other minds. When, reading them later on, I recognize my thoughts in them, as it happened with Blake, I go crying their name everywhere and publishing my discovery. I am told that I am wrong. I don’t care. I take pleasure in quoting and persuade myself, like Montaigne, that only in the eyes of fools do I appear any less personal for it. 

Those on the contrary who gather the ideas of others take great care to hide their “sources.”—There are examples of this among us.

“At the price matches have reached today, it really counts when they don’t burn.”

When desire subsides so does my whole being.

When beauty no longer excites in us any need of approach, of contact, and of embracing, the state of calm that you were fool enough to long for at a time when an excess of desires tormented you, that state no longer seems to you anything but apathy and deserves to be praised only because, perhaps, it makes the idea of death less atrocious, by taming you to it.

“One has no heart in playing, in a world in which everyone is cheating.”

minds accustomed to live according to the rule cease to recognize, as soon as someone escapes the rule, any other domination than that of one’s own sweet will; a persons seems to them a slave as soon as he is a slave to his passions, and, as he escapes the passions when he lives according to duty, he ceases to seem to them a slave and it seems to them that he is free the moment the slavery to which he submits is a moral, banal, and commonly accepted slavery. They cry out: “O Lord, deliver us from ourselves,” and their way of delivering themselves is to bend their thought, their will, their whole being until they desire nothing to which their moral being cannot give complete assent, so that they have an illusion of acting freely while already their choice has ceased to be free, and that constraint to which they submit and the very difficulty they experience in submitting to it are at once a pledge of the error into which their nature hurled them and of the truth of that rule which forces and counterfeits their most sincere impulses.

But the rigorous puritan upbringing by which my parents had fashioned my childhood, but the habit and need of a discipline, allowed me to glimpse, once escaped from the common rule, something quite different from a mere surrender; and this allowed me to shrug my shoulders when I heard myself accused of listening henceforth only to the invitation of pleasure. To rediscover, underneath the factitious creature, the unspoiled self was not, or so it seemed to me, so easy a task; and that new rule of life which was becoming mine; to act according to the greatest sincerity, implied a resolution, a perspicacity, an effort that strained my whole will, so that I never seemed more moral to myself than at the time when I had decided to cease being moral; I mean: to be moral henceforth only in my own way. And I came to understand that perfect sincerity, the kind that, in my opinion, leads to the most valor and greatest dignity, sincerity not only of the act itself but of the motive, can be achieved only through the most constant, but also the least bitter, effort, only with the clearest vision (I mean: the least suspect of self-satisfaction), and the most irony. 

It soon became apparent to me that I had gained almost nothing; that I was still acting only according to the best motive, so long as I made my acts measure up to that approbation which implied, before acting, a sort of deliberation and weighing in imagination, whence the action was delayed and blocked. The promptest, the most sudden action henceforth seemed to me preferable; it seemed to me that my act was all the more sincere since I had swept away before it all those preambles by which I used to attempt to justify it to myself. Henceforth, acting in any way whatever and not giving myself time to reflect, my least acts seemed to me more significant since they were no longer reasoned out. At the same time I delivered myself from anxiety, perplexity, and remorse. And perhaps that intimate gymnastic to which I had first submitted had not been altogether useless and helped me to achieve that state of joy which made me recognize my act to be good solely from the pleasure I took in doing it.

The Greeks, who, not only in the multitude of their statues but also in themselves, left us such a beautiful image of humanity, recognized as many gods as there are instincts, and the problem for them was to keep the inner Olympus in equilibrium, not to subjugate and subdue any of the gods.

It is not so much by his acts that a lover of humanity makes himself useful as by his example. I mean: by his very figure, by the image he offers and leaves behind, and by the happiness and serenity it radiates.