In the first district of Paris, the old street of Bourdonnais, which leads to theSaint-Eustache church, changed much through the ages and saw many things. It was elegant formerly (it is not said that the hotel of Beautiful Gabrielle was there?). It is street of Bourdonnais which Balzac makes place its Anselme Popinot in César Biroteau and Victor Hugo speaks about it in Notre Dame de Paris.
This one sheltered a workshop of restoration of paintings founded in 1740 as indicated it the letters gilded to half erased on the transom glazed above the door. On the higher stringcourse of the cornice, one read: Brisson and Legay - Legay successor. Actually, this last was not any more this world since 1943, but the current successor, Leon Gard, had neglected to substitute his name for it.
This trade of restorer, that it practised with a competence which attracted customers of choice to him before she does not forsake it in the last years, had however stopped its career of painter and he had conceived a certain bitterness of it that its natural philosophy had translated into meditations deep on the company and the life.
It is in the narrow office of this workshop, on books of schoolboys, that it foot-note its reflexions with the steel nib , between the years 1960 and 1979. Here are some.
- Peace and justice -
"made" people always speak about peace because they tend to preserve the acquired goods and those which want "to arrive" always speak about justice those which acquired goods but would still like some speak alternatively about peace and justice according to places' where there are or not things that they ambitionnent to take. Thus peace and justice are not always pure words.
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- the proof -
If a being never gave you proof of a satisfied attachment, how to believe in it differently than by assumption? It follows that many lives are built on assumptions.
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- Capacity -
There are many people not having of capacity or very small who however live and extremely well. Some "arrive" and are rented.
It would be interesting to observe how they are caught there: undoubtedly plays the comedy of what they are not, in which case much would live breach of trust.
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- Wisdom -
To see like supreme good only its own safety, its wellbeing, its comfort, its conservation, its prosperity is a false wisdom passing for true. Wisdom being a properly human feeling, it is necessary that it is located above a purely animal feeling. There is no prudence which must make that a feeling of justice becomes died letter, even if it appears certain that to take party for this justice our good material conservation will harm is much to require because the beings want above all to exist egoistically, the altruism itself being only one means of collective pressure: here is the animal in the man. But there remains this great part of the man who should be satisfied spiritually.
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- Facts -
We hasten to draw the conclusions on facts whose causes all are different from what we believe.
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- Facts and explanations of the facts -
In front of a result, it is necessary to make the share of the facts themselves and the share of the explanations which one gives of these facts. These explanations are assumptions which vary infinitely, sometimes whole with the whole, according to the characters and interests'. the rare one is that the explanations are exact.
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- Scientific diffusion -
It is increasingly difficult and illogical that the great value can occur in the immediate future against the average value or with the lower part of the mediocrity imposed by apparatuses of diffusion such as L has television or the transistors. With these scientific toys which resemble extremely the magic rattle of the pig-keeper of Andersen, the people run infallibly to misfortunes which always bring the false beliefs.
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- Privileges -
the privileged people do not admit that their privileges are removed. For them, the truth, justice start only as from the moment when they obtained them. They would do all to keep them. Also, should not one grant privileges to the light one.
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- Loss of confidence -
Lost confidence is an incurable wound because to let itself go to confidence is a species of crowned rest, total, exceptional which cannot be tarnished, even partially.
This is why, often, one does not want to see that one is betrayed because one knows all that one loses when one is sure. Those which F have profession to deceive confidence know it well because they see making a success of their impostures more shouting. But success even the blind man and too many abuse ends up losing them: the sanctimonious hypocrite of Molière.
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- Peace and the order -
When the evil triumphs, peace and the order are the maintenance of the evil by the laws.
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- Calculation -
More calculations are small, petty, complicated, more the vulgar one finds pleasure and interest believing there to be erudite.
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- Paradox -
The company lives on conventions, beliefs which all are not of the certainty, far from there. The nature, which remains itself through the most anchored uses and, moreover, often contradictory, becomes, in this case, subversive and paradoxical, i.e. in opposition with much of uses.
Those which follow nature frankly because they see the surface one and the forgery of the uses is called subversive and paradoxical in the direction of bad spirits and opposing by system, whereas they by no means seek to oppose the men but endeavour to avoid opposing nature.
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- Rhetoric of the forgery -
There are people who, in certain cases, incline the things as they want that they are and refuse to see them such as they are really, until délibérement denying the obviousness with an ingeniousness which is sometimes of art. These people are useful: they make progress the rigour and the clearness of the reasoning, as well as the precision of the quotations. They do not allow vagueness, the approximation, was it eloquent. They also recall that one can support brilliantly for and it against if one is skilful.
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- Diminution of the age -
Schopenhauer says that with the age, all fades and that all the feelings are reduced. It is a conventional opinion. It would be ridiculous to deny the devastations of old age. However, all the aptitudes do not decrease by intensity not more than all youths are not able and it is, in certain cases, rather change that decline: there are things which do not interest any more or which interest differently; one more sees the things as they are and oneself as one is and one is not able any more to undertake with the only support of the illusions. It is understood, on the other hand, of the things that one did not include/understand front, which appeared impossible appears possible. Things which one did not believe reveal and the age is often the time of the discoveries. In short, the opinion of Schopenhauer is systematic and does not hold account of all reality. In old age, there is an evolution and not only one diminution. Youth has its gaps, it is comprehensible that old age is them his. Not all also does not fade and it is not also uniform. One is more difficult and the things which satisfy are rarer, while the things which displease are more numerous. Old age, it is a difference rather than a slope which one descends.
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- Accuracy of calculation -
The accuracy of calculation is all in any thing. It is necessary, consequently, that the plan where one place is, him also, a calculation right compared to human balance, because nothing is more disastrous than a calculation only right in detail and forgery in essence: the accuracy of the detail worsens the error of the whole by giving him an existence and a side of truth.
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- Reference is not reason -
Dreadful causes get dressed sometimes with worthy references. One can even say that the worse one cause is, the more it needs to be based on references, on a noble house. Because nothing most extremely any more prevents seizing a building, a territory, a fortress, a capacity and from making the opposite of the virtuous beings which it dispossessed by saying that it continues them in the good: it claims even highly that they betrayed and that its intervention very saved. As, is necessary it to judge people by their acts and not by their words and not to forget as to see the fact is essential.
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- The millipede -
Which is that which, discovering a millipede on the wall of its bathroom, did not precipitate to kill it? And yet the weakness of this unhappy millipede threatened it by no means. This insect, as liked its short life like him to him, it was a creature of god. It had even something of extraordinary with its inombrables legs, its scales, its antennas. It had something of extraordinary like all the insects, like all the birds, all the reptiles, all the animals, this extraordinary which appears ordinary by see it. Only, a racist instinct pushes to destroy what is too different from us and appears threatening by this difference-even and is really when what is different from us is also by a force and a larger aggressiveness. At the higher man, there is a generous instinct which respects the weakness through the brutal instinct of destruction, even when it is founded to suppose that this weakness can become force. the superiority of the higher man is in than it is opposed to perfect prudence and in what he also risks that, by a trick immonde, the weakness, the disease, the wound are not simulated and hiding a cruel pîège.
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- The error -
The misfortune of the man, they is that his errors always had hands to act, feet, legs to run, sometimes of the wheels to circulate quickly, machines to crush, even wings to fly. In short, misfortune is that certain small truths and even the large ones can be put at the service of which employs them.
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- The family -
Family is a word at which one preserves a mystical direction without checking his contents. Actually, with favour of this mystic blind, family current, if it is quite true that she is practically organized, is not it morally. One Marie not to be more only, which is futile and pusillanime beside serious problem of the life. One Marie to be pressed on somebody who, in addition to the person, marries also his interests, which became them his and which it defends like such. In certain cases, it is a species of complicity. One Marie also to flee her family which one finds the yoke heavy, which is incoherent since one melts another under the same conditions of them. One Marie to adjust situations, equivalent fortunes without really worrying that enlargement of the capital because it is what one looks like essence. Marie to be integrated firmly into a strong medium which will be still reinforced with our adhesion possible attacks are countered. In short, one Marie for advantages and not for virtues. Many events occur which make of the family a fallacious appearance. one is added randomly and not for a beautiful cause. Undoubtedly, the family can provide happy personal cases but it is with its defending body and in contradiction with the egoistic solidarity which makes alliance. In any event, the happy personal cases can arrive to their fine normal only by breaking a state of affairs organized apart from the moral direction.
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- Mystery -
There are people who claim to twist the neck with the mystery as with as much of falsification and as if all were to be explained or not to be. there is only the reasoning which explains: however, one reasons clearly according to principle whose origin is not clear and, that one wants it or not, mysterious. The reasoning is an instrument of organization and not of judgement of the principles. To want to make preexist the reasoning to all, it is to want that the anvil orders with the blacksmith. To be shocked by an injustice, a cruelty, a cheating, a crime, and not to be shocked by a tidal wave, an earthquake, a storm, even if one is terrified, is unexplainable the with largest donors of explanations and proves péremptoiremnt that the responsibility is a human mystery like many others to which, only, humanity is subjected, one does not know why.
The acceptance of the mystery is of simple obviousness. The reasoning, splendid instrument, but instrument, is by no means reduced by the mystery. It plays its legitimate part which is extremely beautiful in the field of the terrestrial organization where he is a Master provided that he does not claim with being all.
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- Mathematics -
Mathematics, become species of religion of atheistic exactitude and, could one say, of negation of metaphysics, are not very nor even essence. All the times one practised brilliantly mathematics. Pythagore, Plato, Aristote and well of others in one makes on the higher level: they did not discover, that one knows, or did not publish the electricity nor the atomic force such as one sees them today. It appears well that mathematics is what one does them and answer according to whether one questions them of such or such way.
For any mathematics, it is necessary to have an idea. This idea, starting point, are just or not. If it is not it, mathematics which supports it functions in a bad direction and serve it as well as if it were right bus the cause is not returned just by the accuracy of the instrument which serves it.
Mathematics is only one higher instrument which becomes harmful insofar as the orientation of this instrument is harmful (orego majorem, said an old author).
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- Great inventions -
The modern man sings his victories over a nature which is, ultimately, his essential principles, his supreme law.
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- Evil and decline -
The most serious evil is not a bad thing passing for bad but bad a passer by for good. Thus, the evil, they are the good deformed ideas, included/understood with misconception by the decline and alive on the reputation of what they are not any more.