_Do not write on the snow._--Do not teach feeble and sluggish minds.

_Do not eat either your heart or your brain._--Do not give yourself up
to either grief or to too difficult enterprises, etc.

Such are the maxims of Pythagoras, the sense of which is not hard to
understand.

The most beautiful of all the emblems is that of God, whom Timæus of
Locres represents by this idea: _A circle the centre of which is
everywhere and the circumference nowhere._ Plato adopted this emblem;
Pascal had inserted it among the material which he intended using, and
which has been called his "Thoughts."

In metaphysics, in moral philosophy, the ancients have said everything.
We coincide with them, or we repeat them. All modern books of this kind
are only repetitions.

It is above all among the Indians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, that
these emblems, which to us appear most strange, were consecrated. It is
there that the two organs of generation, the two symbols of life, were
carried in procession with the greatest respect. We laugh at it, we dare
treat these peoples as barbarous idiots, because they innocently thanked
God for having given them existence. What would they have said if they
had seen us enter our temples with the instrument of destruction at our
side?

At Thebes the sins of the people were represented by a goat. On the
coast of Phoenicia a naked woman, with a fish's tail, was the emblem
of nature.