🚀 go-pugleaf

and chance removes them; no art can keep
or acquire them.

A thought has escaped me. I wanted to write it down. I write instead that it
has escaped me.

371. When I was small, I hugged my book; and because it sometimes happened
to me to... in believing I hugged it, I doubted....

372. In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me
remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me
as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness.

373. Scepticism.--I shall here write my thoughts without order, and not
perhaps in unintentional confusion; that is true order, which will always
indicate my object by its very disorder. I should do too much honour to my
subject, if I treated it with order, since I want to show that it is
incapable of it.

374. What astonishes me most is to see that all the world is not astonished
at its own weakness. Men act seriously, and each follows his own mode of
life, not because it is in fact good to follow since it is the custom, but
as if each man knew certainly where reason and justice are. They find
themselves continually deceived, and, by a comical humility, think it is
their own fault and not that of the art which they claim always to possess.
But it is well there are so many such people in the world, who are not
sceptics for the glory of scepticism, in order to show that man is quite
capable of the most extravagant opinions, since he is capable of believing
that he is not in a state of natural and inevitable weakness, but, on the
contrary, of natural wisdom.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than that there are some who are not
sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

375. I have passed a great part of my life believing that there was justice,
and in this I was not mistaken; for there is justice according as God has
willed to reveal it to us. But I did not take it so, and this is