A Few Thoughts
Passions are like voyages in
countries that we know through books and from which we can bring
back precious knowledge.
We say to ourselves about a writer: how sad
that he is dead or that he was unhappy, how pleasant it would
have been to know him, and we will not know that he who was
unhappy, who is dead, that we would have known is not so much
that he does these things, suffer, die, know people, but that we
read him. That is not death and we know this.
Ideas are like souls to which perfect
expression gives immortality.
In a writer we look for the man and that man
only dreams of elevating himself to the writer.
A page is immortal even though nobody is ever
going to read it and because it has been placed outside time in
an eternal region. Because immortality is of itself and has no
need of the consciousness that others may have of it.
The most profound maxims are those in which
thought seems to be most independent of words and of their
arrangement.
Passions are like libraries which the vulgar
inhabit without understanding the treasures they contain.
It is as if thought and life are conferred on
us by God as antidotes one for the other. The pleasures of
thought alleviate for us the difficulties of life, and the
pleasures of life make up for that which is too empty in the
difficulties of thought.
In vanity as in love we like to forget the
services that we have rendered to the great or to the one we love
and say: she is so good for me, they are so good for me without
noticing that it is we who have initiated it, because their
favour seems to us to be more flattering if it appears
spontaneous.
The quarrels that strengthen a new love advance
the end of a love that has lasted a long time, like those
illnesses that leave young people stronger but which kill the
old.
Extreme cold burns and there is a sort of
pleasure in extremely bitter sorrows.
From a manuscript
of unknown date.