17) It seems to us that the real labour is the labour on something external: to make, to collect something; property, houses, cattle, fruit; but to labour on one’s own soul--that is just phantasy. And yet every other labour except on one’s own soul, the enlarging of the habits of good, every other labour is a _bagatelle_. 18) They do not obey God, but adore Him. It is better not to adore, but to obey. 19) No matter what the work you are doing, be always ready to drop it. And plan it, so as to be able to leave it. 20) The machine ... is a terrible machine. If we would have clearly understood its danger, we would never have permitted it to be formed. 21) It seems strange and immoral that a writer, an artist, seeing the suffering of people, sympathises less than he observes, in order to reproduce this suffering. But that is not immoral. The suffering of one personality is an insignificant thing in comparison with that spiritual effect, if it is a good one, which a work of art will produce. 22) Humanity, it is an enormous animal who seeks and cannot find what it needs. Very slowly, sensations call forth emotions, and emotions are transmitted to the brain and the brain calls forth acts. The activity of the liberals, Socialists, revolutionaries, are attempts to galvanise, to compel the animal to act by arousing its motor nerves and muscles. But there is one organ which does everything when it is not impaired; in the animal it is the brain, in the people, religion. 23) I am depressed and I ask God to help me. But my work is to serve God and not that He should serve me. 24) An individual, personal life is an illusion. There is no such life; there is only function, a tool, for something. 25) ... is vestigial, having no application, like the appendix. 26) We complain at our depressed spirits, but they are necessary. Man cannot stay on that height to which he sometimes rises; but man rises and then hypnotises himself for the time of his depression and in the time of his depression he already acts from the view-point that was disclosed to him in the moment of rising. If only to know how to make use of those moments of rising and to know how to hypnotise oneself! 27) The evil of the world, its cause is very simple. Every one seeks _midi à quatorze heures_--now in the economic system, now in the political. I just now read the discussions in the German parliament, on how to keep the peasants from running to the cities. But the solution of all problems is one and no one recognises it and it does not even seem to be of interest to them. But the solution is one, clear and undoubted: ... The salvation is one: the destruction of false teaching. 28) The difference between people: N thinks about death, and that does not lead him farther than the question of how and to whom he should leave his money, where and how be buried. And Pascal also thinks about death. 29) ... 30) There is no future. It is made by us.