November 29, 1959
There is nothing more disappointing, more fragile, and more false than a brilliant mind. Prefer the bores: they respect banality; what is eternal in things or in ideas.
I do not understand X: he is boring without being banal. It’s boredom that gets free from the search for originality, from the pursuit of the unusual, from permanent and useless surprise.
Nothing offends so much as a thinker who believes it his duty to solve everything that is posed, who submerges every problem with words. Volubility — a sin against mind. The greatest have not escaped it.
The kind of man I admire: Rancé.
A god begins a false future the moment someone deigns to be killed for him.
From what interior trouble do my cosmological obsessions emerge! It is understandable that they would be so frequent among madmen.
Tacitus, my favorite writer. I entirely concur with Hume’s judgement that he was the most profound mind in Antiquity.
It is not the happiness, but the merit of other people that bothers and troubles us.
Prayer surges from my state of depression which exults.
I am only attached to minds wasted by sterility; or: who excel in sterility. Joubert even seems to me sometimes too fecund.
A religion is finished the moment it bears only heresies.