The Pocket Oracle and the Art of Prudence

To the Reader

No laws for the just, no advice for the wise; and yet no one ever knew enough for his own good. You must forgive me one thing and thank me for another. Forgive me for calling this epitome of the right ways of living an Oracle, which it is, in its sayings and its brevity. Thank me for offering you all twelve Graciáns at a single stroke, each so highly prized that The Man of Discernment had hardly appeared in Spain before it was taken up in France, translated into French and printed at the French court. Let this one serve reason as its bill of fare at the banquet of its wise men, where it can note down the dishes of prudence that will be served to it in the other works, and share out its appetite to suit its temperament.

Aphorisms 1–50

1. Everything Is at Its Peak Now, and Being a Real Person Most of All

It takes more today to make one wise man than it once took to make the Seven Sages of Greece, and more to deal with a single man in these times than it used to take to deal with a whole nation.

2. Temperament and Wit

These are the two axles on which every gift turns and shines, and one without the other is only half a success. Intelligence is not enough; there must be the temperament to go with it. The fool's misfortune is to miss his calling: in his station, his work, his country, his friends.¹

3. Keep Your Affairs in Suspense

Novelty wins wonder, and wonder is what makes success esteemed. Playing with your cards face up is neither useful nor pleasant. Not declaring yourself at once keeps people in suspense, and all the more when a high position makes you the object of everyone's expectation. Hint at mystery in everything, and the very secrecy will stir up reverence. Even when you explain yourself, avoid being too plain, just as in your dealings you do not let everyone see inside you. Guarded silence is the sanctuary of good sense. A resolution once announced was never esteemed; it only lays itself open to criticism, and if it goes wrong, you are unlucky twice over.

Imitate the ways of Providence, then, and keep men watching and lying awake.

4. Knowledge and Courage Take Turns at Greatness

Being greatness themselves, they make men immortal. A man is as much as he knows, and the wise man can do anything. A man without knowledge is a world in the dark. Counsel and strength are the eyes and the hands: without courage, wisdom is barren.

5. Make People Depend on You

It is not the one who adorns the idol who makes it a god, but the one who adores it. The shrewd man would rather have people need him than thank him. To trust to gratitude is to rob hope: hope is a courtier and remembers, gratitude is a peasant and forgets. You get more out of dependence than out of courtesy: the man who has drunk his fill turns his back on the spring at once, and the squeezed orange drops from the golden dish into the mud. When dependence ends, good relations end with it, and esteem goes too. Let this be a lesson, and one of the first that experience teaches: keep hope alive and never satisfy it, so that even a crowned master always needs you. But do not go so far as to keep silent and let him blunder, or make another man's harm incurable for your own profit.

6. A Man at His Peak

No one is born finished. You perfect yourself day by day, in your person and in your work, until you reach the point of complete being, the full measure of gifts and excellences. You will know it by a heightened taste, a refined wit, a ripe judgment, a will drawn off clear of its lees. Some men never become whole; there is always some little thing missing. Others are slow to come to themselves. The finished man, wise in what he says and sensible in what he does, is admitted to the rare company of the discerning, and even sought out by it.²

7. Don't Outshine Your Master

Every victory breeds hatred, and a victory over your master is either foolish or fatal. Superiority was always loathed, and most of all by those who are superior themselves. Care can hide ordinary advantages, as beauty may be disguised by careless dress. You will find people willing to give way to you in luck, or in temperament, but no one in wit, and a sovereign least of all. Wit is the king of attributes, and so every crime against it has been high treason. Sovereigns they are, and they mean to be sovereign in what matters most. Princes like to be helped, not surpassed; they want advice to look like a reminder of something they had forgotten, not a light on something they could not see. The stars teach us this subtlety, and gracefully: though they are the sun's children, and shine themselves, they never dare to outshine him.

8. A Man Beyond Passion

It is a gift of the highest greatness of soul. His very superiority frees him from the rule of stray, common impressions. There is no greater lordship than lordship over yourself and your feelings; it amounts to the triumph of free will. And when passion does take hold of the private man, let it not dare to touch his office, and the higher the office the less: a civil way of sparing yourself trouble, and a short cut to reputation besides.

9. Live Down the Failings of Your Nation

Water takes on the good or bad qualities of the veins of rock it runs through, and a man those of the climate he is born in. Some owe more than others to their homelands, because a kinder sky stood over them. No nation escapes some native defect, not even the most cultivated, and its neighbours are quick to censure it, as a warning or as a consolation. It is a winning skill to correct these national blemishes, or at least to give them the lie: you gain the admired name of being one of a kind among your own people, for what was least expected is most esteemed. There are also the failings of family, of rank, of profession and of age, and if they all meet in one person and he takes no care to head them off, they make an intolerable monster.

10. Fortune and Fame

What the one has of fickleness, the other has of constancy. The first is for living, the second for afterward; the one against envy, the other against oblivion. Fortune is wished for and sometimes helped along; fame is worked for, and the desire for reputation is born of virtue. Fame was, and is, the sister of the giants, as Virgil made her: she always runs to extremes, monsters or marvels, of loathing or of applause.

11. Deal with People You Can Learn From

Let friendly dealings be a school of learning and conversation a cultivated education: make your friends your teachers, and mix the profit of learning with the pleasure of talk. With people of understanding the enjoyment runs both ways: what you say is repaid in the applause it gets, and what you hear in the instruction. Ordinarily it is our own interest that draws us to another; here that interest is ennobled. The watchful man frequents the houses of those heroes of the court which are more theatres of heroism than palaces of vanity. There are lords known for their discernment who are not only oracles of all greatness themselves, by their example and their conversation, but whose following is a courtly academy of every good and gallant kind of discernment.

12. Nature and Art; Material and Workmanship

There is no beauty without help, and no perfection that does not lapse into barbarism without the polish of art: art rescues the bad and perfects the good. Nature usually deserts us at the best moment; let us take refuge in art. The finest natural gifts are rough without it, and perfections lack half of themselves if they lack cultivation. Without art every man tastes of the clod, and he needs polishing in every kind of perfection.

13. Act Now on Second Intention, Now on First

The life of man upon earth is a warfare, as Job said, and it is waged against the malice of man. Shrewdness fights with stratagems of intention. It never does what it signals. It takes aim, yes, but only to dazzle; it feints deftly at the air and strikes where no one was looking, always bent on misleading. It lets one intention show to catch the rival's attention, then wheels round on it and wins by surprise. But a penetrating intelligence forestalls it with watchfulness and lies in wait for it with wariness. It always understands the opposite of what it is meant to understand, and it spots any feint at once. It lets every first intention go by and waits for the second, and even the third. Seeing its artifice found out, pretence goes further and tries to deceive with the truth itself: it changes its game to change its trick, makes an artifice of having no artifice, and founds its cunning on the greatest candour. Observation comes to meet it, sees through its sharpness, and discovers darkness dressed as light; it deciphers the intention, which is most hidden when it looks most simple. It is the old battle at Delphi, the craft of the Python against the candour of Apollo's piercing rays.

14. Substance and Manner

Substance is not enough; you need circumstance too. A bad manner spoils everything, even justice and reason. A good one makes up for everything: it gilds a refusal, sweetens the truth, and puts rouge on old age itself. The how plays a great part in things, and a pleasing little manner is a card sharp who takes every taste. A fine bearing, a bel portarse, is the finery of living, and it carries off every situation handsomely.

15. Keep Wits in Your Service

It is the good fortune of the powerful to surround themselves with champions of understanding who will get them out of every scrape of ignorance and fight their battles with difficulty for them. It is a rare greatness to make use of the wise, and it far outdoes the barbarous taste of Tigranes, the Armenian king who liked conquered kings for his servants. Here is a new kind of lordship, in the best thing life has to offer: to make servants, by art, of those whom nature made your betters. There is much to know and little time to live, and you do not live if you do not know. It is a rare skill, then, to study without effort, and much through many, knowing through them all. Afterwards you speak in council for many, or rather as many wise men speak through your mouth as prepared you, and you win the name of an oracle with another man's sweat. They do the choosing of your reading first, and then serve you knowledge distilled to its quintessence. And if you cannot have wisdom as your servant, have it as your friend.

16. Knowledge with Right Intention

It guarantees a harvest of success. A good mind married to a bad will was always a monstrous, forced match. A malevolent intention poisons every perfection, and with knowledge to help it, it does harm with greater subtlety. Unhappy the eminence that is spent on villainy! Knowledge without sense is madness twice over.

17. Vary the Way You Act

Not always the same way, so as to throw attention off, and above all a rival's. Not always on first intention, or they will catch on to your sameness, forestall you and even frustrate what you do. A bird that flies straight is easy to shoot on the wing; not one that twists. Nor always on second intention, either, or by the second time they will see through the trick. Malice lies in wait, and it takes great subtlety to throw it off. The card sharp never plays the card his opponent expects, still less the one he wants.

18. Application and Minerva

There is no eminence without both, hard work and the native talent Minerva gives, and where they meet, there is excellence to spare. A middling talent with application gets further than a superior one without it. Reputation is bought at the price of labour; what costs little is worth little. Even in the highest posts, it was application that some men lacked, and application rarely lets native talent down. Not to be eminent in a humble post because you would rather be middling in a sublime one has the excuse of a noble spirit; but to be content with being middling in the lowest when you could be excellent in the first has no excuse at all. Nature and art are both required, then, and application sets the seal.

19. Don't Arrive Trailing Too Much Expectation

It is the usual comedown of anything much celebrated in advance that it never lives up to what was imagined. The real could never catch up with the imagined, because perfections are easy to picture and very hard to achieve. Imagination marries desire, and between them they always conceive far more than things really are. However great the excellences, they are not enough to satisfy the idea of them, and since they find it cheated by an inflated expectation, they disillusion it sooner than they win its admiration. Hope is a great falsifier of the truth: let good sense correct it, and see that the enjoyment outdoes the desire. A good start to your reputation should serve to rouse curiosity, not to pledge the outcome. Things go best when the reality exceeds the idea and turns out to be more than was believed. This rule fails with bad things, which exaggeration actually helps: when the reality gives it the lie, the reality is applauded, and what was feared to be the depth of wickedness comes to seem quite bearable.

20. A Man of His Century

Rare and eminent people depend on their times. Not all of them had the age they deserved, and many who did have it did not manage to make use of it. Some were worthy of a better century, for not everything good always triumphs; things have their turn, and even eminence follows the fashion. But wisdom has one advantage, which is that it is eternal, and if this is not its century, many others will be.

21. The Art of Being Lucky

There are rules for luck, for to the wise it is not all chance; it can be helped along by effort. Some are content to stand hopefully at Fortune's gates and wait for her to act. Others do better: they push on through and make use of a sensible daring, which on the wings of their merit and courage can overtake good luck and flatter her to good effect. But, to philosophise properly, there is no other way than virtue and watchfulness, because there is no luck or bad luck except prudence and imprudence.

22. A Man of Admired Knowledge

The ammunition of the discerning is a courtly, tasteful learning: a practical knowledge of everything that is going on, leaning more to the news than to the commonplace. Keep a well-seasoned stock of salt in your sayings and gallantry in your deeds, and know how to use them at the right moment, for a piece of advice has sometimes gone down better in a joke than in the gravest lecture. Wisdom you can talk with has done more for some men than all seven of the liberal arts, liberal as they are.

23. Have No Blemish

It is the condition of perfection. Few live without some failing, moral or natural, and they grow fond of their failings when they could easily cure them. Other people's good sense is pained to see a tiny defect attack a sublime array of gifts, and a single cloud is enough to eclipse a whole sun. Such things are moles on the face of reputation, and malice stops there at once and keeps on looking. The supreme skill would be to turn them into ornaments, as Caesar did when he covered his baldness with a laurel wreath and crowned nature's slight.

24. Keep Your Imagination in Hand

Sometimes correct it, sometimes help it, for it is everything to happiness, and it even sets good sense in order. It turns tyrant. It is not content to look on, but acts, and often takes over a life entirely, making it pleasant or burdensome according to the folly it falls into, for it makes people either discontented or pleased with themselves. To some it shows nothing but sufferings, a household executioner for fools. To others it holds out joys and adventures in a merry giddiness. It can do all this unless it is reined in by synderesis, the soul's inborn sense of right, at its most prudent.

25. A Word to the Wise

The art of arts was once to know how to reason; that is no longer enough. You have to guess, especially where you are being undeceived. No one can be understood who does not understand well himself. There are dowsers of the heart and lynxes of intentions. The truths that matter most to us always come half spoken; let the watchful man take them in whole: in pleasant matters, keep a tight rein on belief; in hateful ones, give it the spur.

26. Find the Screw That Turns Each Man

This is the art of moving wills. It lies more in skill than in determination: knowing where to get in with each person. There is no will without its particular passion, and passions differ as tastes do. All men are idolaters, some of esteem, some of profit, and most of pleasure. The knack lies in knowing these idols in order to move people, knowing each man's working motive: it is like holding the key to another's will. Go to his prime mover, which in a man, unlike the heavens, is not always the highest part but more often the lowest, because in this world the disordered outnumber the well ordered. First study his temperament, then find the word that touches him, then bear down with his passion, and you will checkmate his free will without fail.

27. Prize Intensity over Extent

Perfection lies not in quantity but in quality. Everything really good has always been scarce and rare; abundance brings discredit. Even among men, the giants are usually the real dwarfs. Some judge books by their bulk, as if they were written to exercise the arms rather than the mind. Extent alone never rose above the middling, and it is the plague of universal men that, by wanting to be in everything, they are in nothing. Intensity gives eminence, and heroic eminence if the subject is sublime.

28. Common in Nothing

Not in taste, first of all. Oh, he was a great wise man who was displeased to find his work pleasing to the many! The discerning are not satisfied with surfeits of common applause. Some are such chameleons of popularity that they feed, as the chameleon was thought to feed on air, not on the gentlest breezes of Apollo but on the breath of the crowd. Nor in understanding: take no pleasure in the miracles of the crowd, which are no more than tricks to amaze the ignorant, admired by common folly while the uncommon mind sees through them.

29. A Man of Integrity

He is always on the side of reason, and so firm in his purpose that neither the passion of the crowd nor the violence of a tyrant will ever make him step over reason's line. But who will be this phoenix of fairness? Integrity has few true followers. Many praise it, but not at home; others follow it up to the point of danger, and there the false deny it and the politic gloss it over. Integrity does not mind colliding with friendship, with power, even with its own interest, and that is where the temptation to disown it comes. The astute draw fine distinctions with an admired metaphysics so as not to offend either higher reason or reason of state; but the constant man counts dissembling as a kind of treason. He prides himself more on tenacity than on cleverness. He is found where the truth is found, and if he leaves people, it is not from any change in him, but because they left the truth first.

30. Make No Profession of Discredited Pursuits

Still less of fantastic ones, which win contempt rather than credit. The sects of caprice are many, and the sensible man must flee them all. There are exotic tastes that always marry whatever the wise repudiate; they live very pleased with every oddity, and though it makes them well known, it is more as a cause of laughter than of reputation. The watchful man must not make himself conspicuous even in the profession of wisdom, much less in those pursuits that make their followers ridiculous. There is no need to name them, for common contempt has already singled them out.

31. Know the Fortunate, to Choose Them, and the Unfortunate, to Flee Them

Misfortune is usually the crime of folly, and catching for those who share in it: no contagion clings so fast. Never open the door to the smallest ill, for many others will always come in after it, and greater ones, lying in ambush. The best trick in the game is knowing what to discard: the smallest card of the suit that is trumps now is worth more than the highest of the suit that was trumps before. When in doubt, the right move is to stay close to the wise and prudent, who sooner or later run into good luck.

32. Be Known for Giving Pleasure

For those who govern, a name for pleasing is a great credit, and the glory of sovereigns, by which they win the favour of all. This is the one advantage of command: to be able to do more good than anyone else. The true friends are those who do friendly things. Others, on the contrary, are set on giving no pleasure, not so much because it is a burden as out of malice, opposed in everything to the divine way of sharing what is good.

33. Know How to Stand Aside

If knowing how to say no is a great lesson in living, knowing how to deny yourself to business and to important people is a greater one. There are pointless occupations, moths of precious time, and it is worse to be busy with the irrelevant than to do nothing. For the watchful man it is not enough not to meddle; he must also see that he is not meddled with. He must not belong so much to everyone that he does not belong to himself. Even friends must not be abused, and you should not want more from them than they grant. Everything in excess is a vice, and most of all in dealings with people. By this sensible restraint you keep everyone's goodwill better, and their esteem, because that most precious thing, decorum, is never rubbed away. Keep your temperament free, then, devoted to what is choice, and never sin against the faith of your good taste.

34. Know Your Crowning Gift

That is, your outstanding gift: cultivate it, and help the others along. Anyone could have reached eminence in something if he had known where his advantage lay. Find your king attribute and pile your application onto it: in some it is judgment that excels, in others courage. Most people force their Minerva and work against the grain of their talent, and so they reach superiority in nothing: what passion is quick to flatter, time is slow to undeceive.

35. Think Things Over

And most of all what matters most. Not thinking is how all fools come to grief. They never grasp half of anything, and since they cannot see the harm or the advantage, they put no effort in either. Some make much of what matters little and little of what matters much, always weighing things backwards. Many never lose their senses, for want of any to lose. There are things that should be looked into with all one's might and kept in the depths of the mind. The wise man thinks about everything, but with discrimination: he digs where there is depth and something worth noticing, and sometimes thinks there is more there than he thinks, so that reflection reaches where first perception did not.

36. Take the Measure of Your Luck

Do it before you act, and before you commit yourself. It matters more than knowing your constitution: if it is foolish at forty to send for Hippocrates to look after your health, when by then a man should be his own doctor, it is more foolish still to send for Seneca to give you sense. It is a great art to steer your luck, now waiting on it, for there is room for waiting in it, now seizing it, for it has its turns and its chances, though you can never catch its rhythm, so irregular are its ways. Whoever has found it favourable should press on with confidence, for luck tends to fall for the bold and, being a gallant lady, for the young. Whoever is unlucky should not act; let him withdraw, and not give it the chance to make him unlucky twice. Let the man it favours go forward.

37. Know the Barbs and How to Use Them

This is the subtlest point in dealing with people. Barbs are thrown out to test men's minds, and with them you can make the most disguised and penetrating probe of the heart. Others are malicious, thrown in earnest, tipped with the poison of envy and smeared with the venom of passion: invisible thunderbolts to bring a man down from favour and esteem. Many have fallen from the favour of those above them and those below, wounded by one light remark of this kind, when a whole conspiracy of common gossip and private malice had not been enough to make them so much as tremble. Others, on the contrary, work in your favour, propping up your reputation and confirming it. But with the same skill with which intention throws them, caution must receive them and watchfulness wait for them, for defence lies in knowing, and the shot foreseen always misses.

38. Quit While You're Ahead

That is what every gambler of standing does. A fine retreat matters as much as a gallant attack: bank your exploits when they are enough, or when they are many. A long run of good luck was always suspect; the broken kind is safer, and a touch of bittersweet makes it better even to enjoy. The more good fortunes trample on each other's heels, the greater the risk that they will slip and bring the whole thing down. Fortune sometimes makes up for the shortness of her favour with its intensity. She gets tired of carrying one man on her back for so long.

39. Know When Things Are Ripe, and Make the Most of Them

The works of nature all reach the fullness of their perfection: up to that point they were gaining, from then on they lose. Of the works of art, few reach the point where they cannot be improved. It is the mark of good taste to enjoy each thing at its fullness. Not everyone can, and not all who can know how. Even the fruits of the mind have this point of ripeness, and it matters to recognise it, both to value them and to use them.

40. The Favour of People

It is much to win general admiration, but more to win affection. Something of it lies in the stars, but most of it is effort: it begins with the first and goes on with the second. Eminent gifts are not enough, though it is assumed that once you have won people's good opinion their affection is easy to win. To be well wished, then, you must do well: do good with both hands, good words and better deeds, love in order to be loved. Courtesy is the greatest political charm great personages have. Reach first for great deeds and then for pens, from the blade to the leaves of a book, for writers too have their favour to give, and it is eternal.

41. Never Exaggerate

It is a great point of watchfulness not to talk in superlatives, both so as not to risk offending the truth and so as not to tarnish your good sense. Exaggerations squander esteem, and they betray a shortage of knowledge and of taste. Praise sharply arouses curiosity and whets desire; and afterwards, if the worth does not match the price that was put on it, as usually happens, expectation turns on the deceit and takes its revenge by despising both the thing praised and the one who praised it. The sensible man holds himself back, then, and would rather err on the side of too little than too much. True eminences are rare: temper your esteem. Overpraising is a branch of lying, and by it you lose your credit for good taste, which is great, and for understanding, which is greater.

42. Natural Authority

It is a secret force of superiority. It must not come from tiresome contrivance but from a commanding nature. Everyone submits to it without noticing how, recognising the secret vigour of inborn authority. These are lordly temperaments, kings by merit and lions by innate privilege, who capture the hearts of others, and even their minds, through the respect they inspire. If their other gifts are favourable, they are born to be the prime movers of the state, because they get more done with a gesture than others with a long harangue.

43. Think with the Few and Speak with the Many

Going against the current is as useless for opening people's eyes as it is easy for getting into danger. Only a Socrates could take it on. Dissent is taken as an insult, because it condemns other people's judgment. The offended multiply, some on behalf of the thing criticised, some on behalf of the man who praised it. Truth belongs to the few; error is as common as the crowd. You cannot judge the wise man by what he says in the public square, for there he speaks not with his own voice but with the voice of common folly, however much his inner self denies it. The sensible man avoids being contradicted as much as contradicting: quick as he is to censure, he is slow to make his censure public. Thought is free; it cannot and should not be forced. It retires into the sanctuary of its silence, and if it sometimes lets itself out, it is in the shade, among a sensible few.

44. Sympathy with Great Men

It is the gift of a hero to be in tune with heroes: a marvel of nature, as much for how hidden it is as for how much it gains. There is a kinship of hearts and of temperaments, and its effects are what common ignorance puts down to love potions. It does not stop at esteem; it goes on to goodwill, and even to attachment. It persuades without words and wins without merit. There is an active kind and a passive kind, both happy, and the happier the more sublime. It is a great skill to recognise them, tell them apart and know how to use them, for no amount of persistence is enough without this secret favour.

45. Use Wariness, but Don't Abuse It

Never make a show of it, still less let it be seen. All art must be hidden, because it is suspect, and above all the art of caution, which is hateful. Deceit is much practised, so let suspicion multiply, but without letting itself be known, for that would breed distrust: it gives great offence, provokes revenge, and wakes the harm no one had thought of. Reflection in your conduct is a great advantage in action, and there is no better proof of a reasoning mind. The greatest perfection of any action rests on the mastery with which it is carried out.

46. Correct Your Antipathies

We are apt to hate readily, and even before we have seen what a man is worth. And sometimes this inborn aversion, which drags us down to the crowd's level, dares to fasten on eminent men. Let good sense correct it, for there is no worse discredit than to hate the best: as much as sympathy with heroes is to your credit, antipathy to them is to your shame.

47. Avoid Entanglements

This is one of the first concerns of prudence. In great minds there are always great distances to cover before the final extremes: it is a long way from one end to the other, and they always keep to the middle of their good sense. They come late to an open breach, because it is easier to dodge the occasion than to come out of it well. Such things are temptations to judgment, and it is safer to flee them than to conquer them. One entanglement brings on a greater one, and that one stands at the very edge of a fall. There are men who are quarrelsome by temperament, and even by nation, quick to tie themselves into obligations; but the man who walks by the light of reason always stays well above the business. He thinks it greater courage not to get entangled than to win, and when there is already one fool spoiling for a fight, he makes sure there are not two.

48. A Man of Depth Is So Much More a Person

The inside must always be as much again as the outside, in everything. Some people are all façade, like houses left unfinished because the money ran out: the entrance of a palace and the living quarters of a hut. With them there is nowhere to stop, or rather everything stops, for once the first greeting is over, so is the conversation. They come prancing through the opening courtesies like Sicilian horses, and then turn into silentiaries, those officers of an emperor's court whose whole duty was silence, for words run dry where no spring of thought keeps them flowing. They easily fool others whose eyes are also only for the surface, but not the astute, who look inside, find them hollow, and make them a byword among the discerning.

49. A Man of Judgment and Observation

He masters things; things do not master him. He sounds the bottom of the deepest depth at once, and he can dissect a man's worth to perfection. He sees a person and has him grasped, judged down to his essence. He is a man of rare observation, a great decipherer of the most guarded inner life. He notes sharply, conceives subtly, infers judiciously: he discovers, notices, reaches and comprehends everything.

50. Never Lose Your Respect for Yourself

And never take liberties with yourself when you are alone. Let your own integrity be the measure of your uprightness, and owe more to the strictness of your own judgment than to all the precepts outside you. Refrain from what is unseemly more for fear of your own good sense than for the rigour of anyone else's authority. Come to stand in awe of yourself, and you will have no need of the imaginary guardian Seneca advised, the Cato you were to picture watching everything you do.

Aphorisms 51–100

51. A Man Who Chooses Well

Most of life depends on it. It requires good taste and the soundest judgment, for study and wit are not enough. There is no perfection where there is no choice, and choice holds two advantages: being able to choose, and choosing the best. Many men of fertile, subtle wit, of keen judgment, studious and well informed besides, are lost the moment they come to choose. They always marry the worst, as if they made a point of going wrong; and so this is one of the greatest gifts from above.

52. Never Lose Your Composure

It is a great aim of good sense never to come apart. It shows a man of real stature, with a crowned heart, for all magnanimity is hard to unsettle. The passions are the humours of the mind, and any excess in them makes good sense ill; and if the illness reaches the mouth, your reputation is in danger. Be so much your own master, then, and so great, that neither in the best of fortune nor in the worst can anyone censure you for being shaken, only admire you for standing above it.

53. Diligent and Intelligent

Diligence quickly carries out what intelligence slowly thinks through. Haste is the passion of fools: since they cannot see the obstacle, they act without caution. The wise, on the contrary, tend to sin by delay, for seeing a thing gives rise to second thoughts. Sometimes a sound decision is wasted through slowness in carrying it out. Promptness is the mother of good fortune. He did much who left nothing for tomorrow. Make haste slowly: an august motto, and Augustus's own.

54. Have Spirit, but Sensibly

Even hares pluck the beard of a dead lion. Courage is no joking matter: if it gives way to the first, it will have to give way to the second as well, and so on to the last. The same difficulty will have to be overcome in the end, and it would have been better done at once. The spirit's strength exceeds the body's. It is like the sword: it must always go sheathed in good sense, ready for the occasion. It is a man's safeguard, and a failing of the spirit does more harm than a failing of the body. Many men have had eminent gifts, and for want of this breath of the heart have seemed dead and ended buried in their own slackness; for it was not without providence that a thoughtful nature joined the sweetness of honey to the sharpness of the sting in the bee. There are sinews and bones in the body: do not let the spirit be all softness.

55. A Man Who Can Wait

It shows a great heart, with room to spare for patience. Never be in a hurry, and never in a passion. Be master of yourself first, and you will be master of others afterwards. You must travel through the long reaches of time to the centre of the opportunity. Prudent delay seasons success and ripens secrets. Time's crutch does more work than the steel club of Hercules. God himself punishes not with the cudgel but with the calendar. A great saying: "Time and I against any two." Fortune herself rewards waiting with the greatness of the prize.

56. Be Good on the Spur of the Moment

It comes from a happy readiness. For it there are no tight corners and no accidents, thanks to its liveliness and ease. Some think a great deal only to get everything wrong afterwards, and others get everything right without thinking first. There are minds that work by antiperistasis, like the fire that was thought to burn hotter for the cold around it: they do better when hard pressed. They are usually prodigies who get everything right on the spur of the moment and everything wrong on reflection; what does not occur to them at once never will, and there is no appealing to later. The quick are admired because they show a prodigious capacity: subtlety in their thinking, good sense in their actions.

57. The Considered Are the Surer

Soon enough, if well enough. What is done in a moment is undone in a moment; but what is to last an eternity must take another eternity to make. Attend only to perfection, for only what is right endures. An understanding with depths achieves eternities. What is worth much costs much; even the most precious of metals is the slowest and the heaviest.

58. Know How to Adjust Yourself

You need not show yourself equally intelligent with everyone, nor use more strength than is called for. Let nothing be wasted, neither knowledge nor merit. The good falconer flies no more birds at the quarry than it takes to bring it down. Do not always be on display, or tomorrow you will no longer amaze. There must always be something new to shine with, for the man who reveals more every day keeps expectation alive, and no one ever comes to the limits of his great resources.

59. A Man Who Leaves a Good Taste

In the house of Fortune, if you come in by the door of pleasure you go out by the door of grief, and the other way round. Pay attention, then, to the ending, and take more care over a happy exit than over an applauded entrance. It is the common mischance of the fortunate to have very favourable beginnings and very tragic ends. What counts is not the common applause of an entrance, for everyone gets that, but the general regret at a departure, for those who are missed are rare. Good Fortune seldom sees anyone out: as courteous as she is to those who arrive, so rude is she to those who leave.

60. Sound Judgment

Some men are born prudent. They come into wisdom with the advantage of an inborn synderesis, and so they are halfway to success already. With age and experience their reason comes fully into season, and they arrive at a well-tempered judgment. They abhor every whim as a temptation to good sense, above all in matters of state, where the supreme importance of the business demands complete security. Such men deserve to stand at the helm, either to steer or to advise.

61. Eminence in What Is Best

A great singularity among a plurality of perfections. There can be no hero without some sublime excellence: the middling are no subject for applause. Eminence in a high calling lifts a man out of the common run and raises him to the rank of the rare. To be eminent in a humble profession is to be something in little; what has more of the delightful has less of the glorious. To excel in the highest matters is like a mark of sovereignty: it calls for admiration and wins affection.

62. Work with Good Instruments

Some would like to show the height of their subtlety by the poorness of their instruments: a dangerous satisfaction, and one that deserves a fatal punishment. The goodness of the minister never lessened the greatness of the master; on the contrary, all the glory of success falls afterwards on the principal cause, just as the blame does in failure. Fame always goes with the first. It never says, "He had good ministers," or "bad ones," but "He was a good craftsman," or "a bad one." Let there be choice, then, and let there be scrutiny, for you are trusting them with an immortality of reputation.

63. The Excellence of Being First

And if with eminence, it is doubled. It is a great advantage to play first, for in an equal game it wins. Many would have been phoenixes in their callings if others had not gone before them. The first carry off fame's entailed estate, and the second are left to go to law for a younger son's allowance; however much they sweat, they cannot clear themselves of the common failing of imitation. It was the subtlety of prodigies to find a new road to eminence, provided good sense first secured the venture. By the novelty of their subjects the wise have made themselves a place on the roll of heroes. Some would rather be first in the second rank than second in the first.

64. Know How to Spare Yourself Sorrows

It is a profitable good sense that saves you vexations. Prudence avoids many: it is the Lucina of happiness, the goddess who brings it to birth, and so of contentment. Bad news you should not give, and still less receive: bar it every entrance except the one by which the remedy comes. Some people's ears are worn out with hearing too much sweetness in flattery, others' with listening to bitterness in gossip; and there are those who cannot live without some daily dose of unpleasantness, any more than Mithridates could without his poison. Nor is it a rule for keeping yourself whole to take on a lifetime's sorrow to give someone else pleasure once, however close he is to you. Never sin against your own happiness to please the man who gives advice and stays out of it; and in every case, when giving pleasure to another means giving yourself pain, the lesson of self-interest is that it is better for him to be displeased now than for you to be so later, and past remedy.

65. Exalted Taste

It can be cultivated, like wit. A fine understanding heightens the appetite for desiring, and then the enjoyment of possessing. You know the height of a man's capacity by the loftiness of what he cares for. A great capacity needs a great object to satisfy it: as great mouthfuls are for great palates, sublime matters are for sublime temperaments. The boldest objects fear it, and the surest perfections lose confidence before it; those of the first magnitude are few: let your esteem be rare. Tastes are caught by contact and inherited by long acquaintance, and it is great good luck to keep company with someone whose taste is at its peak. But you must not make a profession of being displeased with everything, which is one of the foolish extremes, and more odious when it comes of affectation than of temper. Some would like God to create another world and other perfections to satisfy their extravagant fancy.

66. See That Things Turn Out Well

Some fix their eyes more on the correctness of the method than on the happiness of reaching the goal, but the discredit of failure always weighs more than the credit of diligence. The winner owes no explanations. Most people do not see the niceties of the circumstances, only the good or bad outcome; and so you never lose reputation when you achieve what you set out to do. A good end gilds everything, however much the blunders of the means may belie it. For it is an art to go against the rules of art when there is no other way to the happiness of coming out well.

67. Prefer Callings That Are Admired

Most things depend on the satisfaction of others. Esteem is to perfections what the west wind is to flowers: breath and life. There are callings exposed to universal acclaim, and others, though greater, that no one watches. The first, being carried out in full view, capture the goodwill of all; the second, though they have more of the rare and the exquisite, remain in the secrecy of not being noticed: venerated, but not applauded. Among princes it is the victorious who are celebrated, and that is why the kings of Aragon were so admired as warriors, conquerors and great-souled men. Let the great man prefer the famous callings that all can see and all can share in, and be made immortal by the common vote.

68. Lend Others Understanding

It is a finer thing than lending them memory, by as much as it is more. Sometimes you must remind, and sometimes advise. Some people fail to do things that would have been just right, because those things do not occur to them; let friendly advice help them see where their advantage lies. One of the great advantages of a mind is that what matters occurs to it. For want of this, many a success goes undone. Let the man who has light give it, and the man who lacks it beg for it: the first with restraint, the second with attention; let it be no more than a hint. This subtlety is urgent when it touches the interest of the one who prompts. Show some taste for the matter, and go further when that is not enough. You already have the No: go after the Yes with skill, for most of the time it is not won because it is not tried.

69. Don't Give In to a Common Mood

He is a great man who is never subject to passing impressions. Reflecting on yourself is a lesson in watchfulness: knowing your present disposition and forestalling it, even leaning over to the opposite extreme, so as to find, between nature and art, the true balance of synderesis. Knowing yourself is the beginning of correcting yourself; for there are monsters of unreason who are always in some mood or other and change their affections with it, and, dragged along forever by this unruly temper, they commit themselves to contradictions. And this excess does not only wear out the will; it dares to touch the judgment, unsettling both wanting and understanding.

70. Know How to Refuse

Not everything is to be granted, nor to everyone. Knowing how to refuse matters as much as knowing how to grant, and in those who command it is an urgent part of watchfulness. Here the manner comes in: some people's no is more esteemed than others' yes, for a gilded no satisfies more than a bare yes. There are many who always have no in their mouths, and with it they spoil everything. No always comes first with them, and though they end by granting everything, they get no credit for it, because that first unpleasantness came before. Do not refuse point-blank: let the disappointment go down in sips. Nor refuse outright, for that would cut off all dependence. Always leave some remnants of hope to temper the bitterness of refusal. Let courtesy fill the gap left by the favour, and good words make up for the lack of deeds. No and Yes are quickly said, and they call for a great deal of thought.

71. Don't Be Inconsistent or Erratic in Your Conduct

Not by nature, and not by affectation. The sensible man was always the same in everything that is perfect, which is the mark of an understanding mind. If he changes, let it depend on a change in the causes and the merits. In matters of good sense, variety is ugly. There are some people who are someone else every day; even their understanding is uneven, and how much more their will, and even their luck. What was white to their yes yesterday is black to their no today, and they are forever giving the lie to their own credit and confusing other people's idea of them.

72. A Man of Resolution

Bad execution does less harm than irresolution. Things are not so spoiled when they flow as when they stagnate. There are men who cannot make up their minds and need someone else to set them moving in everything; and sometimes this comes not so much from a confusion of judgment, for theirs is sharp, as from incapacity. It is clever to find difficulties, but cleverer to find a way round them. There are others who are never at a loss, of great and decided judgment; they were born for sublime posts, because their clear grasp makes for success and dispatch. They find everything done to hand, and one such man, after settling the affairs of one world, had time left over for another. And when they are sure of their luck, they commit themselves with all the more confidence.

73. Know How to Use Evasion

It is how the sensible get out of trouble. With the gallantry of a witty remark they often find their way out of the most intricate labyrinth. A smile lets them slip gracefully out of the most difficult dispute. The greatest of the great captains founded his courage on this. A courteous trick of refusal is to change the subject, and there is no greater watchfulness than not to seem to understand.

74. Don't Be Unapproachable

The true wild beasts are found in the most crowded places. Inaccessibility is the vice of men who do not know themselves, whose humours change with their honours. Annoying people is no way to begin winning their esteem. What a sight one of these unapproachable monsters is, always ready with his impertinent fierceness! Those who depend on him go in to speak to him, to their misfortune, as if to fight with tigers, armed as much with caution as with fear. To climb to their post they pleased everybody, and once in it they want to make up for it by displeasing everybody. Their office should make them belong to many; their harshness or their pride makes them belong to no one. The courtly punishment for such men is to leave them alone, and by withholding your company, withhold the good sense it would have taught them.

75. Choose a Heroic Model

More to rival than to imitate. There are exemplars of greatness, living texts of reputation. Let each man set before himself the first in his own calling, not so much to follow them as to overtake them. Alexander wept not for Achilles in his tomb but for himself, not yet properly born to glory. Nothing so stirs ambition in the soul as the trumpet of another man's fame: the same thing that floors envy puts heart into a noble spirit.

76. Don't Always Be Joking

Prudence is known in serious things, which carry more credit than clever ones. The man who is always joking is never a man in earnest. We treat such people like liars and give them no credit: the liars for fear of a lie, the jokers for fear of a jest. You never know when they are speaking with judgment, which is as good as having none. Nothing falls flatter than wit that never stops. Some win a name for being amusing and lose their credit for being sensible. Merriment must have its hour; all the rest belong to seriousness.

77. Know How to Be All Things to All Men

A discerning Proteus: learned with the learned, and with the saint a saint. It is a great art for winning everyone, because likeness breeds goodwill. Observe temperaments and tune yourself to each: with the serious and with the merry, go with the current, making a politic transformation, which is urgent for those who depend on others. This great subtlety of living calls for great resources; it is less difficult for the universal man, with wit in his knowledge and temperament in his tastes.

78. Art in Your Undertakings

Folly always rushes in headlong, for all fools are bold. The same simplicity that first prevents them from noticing the dangers later takes away their feeling for the rebuffs. But good sense goes in very carefully. Its scouts are watchfulness and caution, and they go ahead exploring so that it can proceed without danger. Discernment condemns all rashness to a fall, even if luck sometimes acquits it. Go slowly where you fear the water is deep: let shrewdness feel the way and prudence gain ground. There are great shoals in human dealings today, and you must keep taking soundings.

79. A Genial Temperament

If it is tempered, it is a gift and not a defect. A grain of pleasantry seasons everything. The greatest men also play the part of wit, which wins them universal favour, but always keeping up the manners of good sense and saluting decorum. Others make a joke a short cut out of difficulty, for there are things that must be taken lightly, and sometimes the very ones the other man takes most seriously. It shows a pleasant nature, a grappling hook for hearts.

80. Take Care How You Are Informed

Most of life is lived on information. What we see ourselves is the least of it; we live on other people's word. The ear is the side door of truth and the front door of lies. Truth is ordinarily seen and only exceptionally heard; it seldom arrives in its pure element, and less still when it comes from far away. It always brings some admixture of the feelings it has passed through, and passion, hateful or favourable, dyes everything it touches with its own colours. It always aims to make an impression. Be very wary of the man who praises, and more wary still of the one who blames. This is where you need all your watchfulness, to discover the intention of the go-between and to know beforehand which foot he started on. Let wariness be your assayer, to test for short weight and false coin.

81. Renew Your Lustre

It is the phoenix's privilege. Excellence grows old, and fame with it. Habit lessens admiration, and a middling novelty often beats the greatest eminence grown old. Be born again, then, in courage, in wit, in fortune, in everything: commit yourself to new and gallant exploits, rise many times like the sun, and change the stage on which you shine, so that in the one place your absence and in the other your novelty may win you desire there and applause here.

82. Never Press Too Hard, Either on the Bad or on the Good

A wise man once reduced all wisdom to moderation in everything. The extreme of right turns into wrong, and the orange that is squeezed too hard ends up yielding bitterness. Even in enjoyment you must never go to extremes. Wit itself runs dry if you press it, and whoever milks like a tyrant will draw blood instead of milk.

83. Allow Yourself Some Venial Slip

For a little carelessness is sometimes the best recommendation of your gifts. Envy has its ostracism, all the more civil the more criminal it is. It accuses the very perfect of sinning by not sinning, and, because it is perfect in everything, condemns it for everything. It turns Argus, the hundred-eyed, looking for faults in what is very good, if only for its own consolation. Censure, like lightning, strikes the highest summits. Let Homer nod now and then, then, and affect some carelessness in wit or in courage, but never in good sense, to soothe malevolence before it bursts with venom: it will be like throwing your cape to the bull of envy to save your immortality.

84. Know How to Use Your Enemies

You must know how to take everything not by the blade, where it wounds, but by the hilt, where it defends; and rivalry most of all. The wise man gets more use from his enemies than the fool from his friends. Ill will often levels mountains of difficulty that goodwill would not have dared to take on. Many owe their greatness to those who wished them ill. Flattery is crueller than hatred, for hatred cures the faults that flattery hides. The sensible man makes a mirror of spite, more faithful than the mirror of affection, and forestalls slander by getting rid of his defects, or correcting them; for great is the caution of the man who lives on the frontier of a rivalry, of an ill will.

85. Don't Be the Card Everyone Plays

It is the failing of everything excellent that much use turns into abuse. The very fact that everyone covets it ends by making everyone tired of it. It is a great misfortune to be good for nothing, and no less a one to want to be good for everything. Such people lose by winning too much, and are afterwards as much loathed as they were once desired. These cards everyone plays wear thin in every kind of perfection: losing the first esteem they had for being rare, they earn the contempt reserved for the common. The only remedy for every extreme is to keep a mean in your display: let the excess be in the perfection and the restraint in the show. The brighter a torch burns, the faster it is consumed and the shorter it lasts. Scarcity of appearance is rewarded with gains in esteem.³

86. Head Off Bad Rumours

The crowd has many heads, and so many eyes for malice and many tongues for slander. Sometimes a bad report runs through it that tarnishes the greatest credit, and if it ever becomes a common nickname, it will finish off your reputation. The occasion is usually some conspicuous blunder or ridiculous defect, which is welcome matter for their gossip; though there are also stains thrown on purpose by private rivalry for common malice to spread, for there are mouths of malevolence, and they ruin a great fame faster with a joke than with an open insult. A bad name is very easy to get, because bad things are very believable, and it costs a great deal to wipe out. Let the sensible man avoid such blunders, then, opposing his watchfulness to the insolence of the crowd, for it is easier to prevent than to remedy.

87. Culture and Polish

Man is born a barbarian and redeems himself from the beast by cultivation. Culture makes persons, and the more of it, the more of a person. Because of it Greece could call the whole rest of the world barbarian. Ignorance is very coarse, and nothing cultivates like knowledge. But even wisdom is crude if it is unpolished. Not only must the understanding be polished, but the will too, and conversation most of all. There are men naturally polished, elegant within and without, in thought and word, in the dress of the body, which is like the bark, and in the gifts of the soul, which are the fruit. There are others, on the contrary, so crude that they have tarnished everything they have, sometimes even their eminent gifts, with an intolerable, barbarous slovenliness.

88. Deal on a Large Scale, Aiming at What Is Lofty

The great man must not be petty in his conduct. Never go too much into detail, least of all in disagreeable matters; for though it is an advantage to notice everything casually, it is not to want to investigate everything on purpose. You must usually proceed with a gentlemanly breadth, which is a branch of gallantry. Much of ruling lies in overlooking. You must let most things pass, among your household, among your friends, and still more among your enemies. All excess of detail is tiresome, and in a man's character, burdensome. To keep going back and forth over a grievance is a kind of mania; and as a rule each man's way of conducting himself will be as his heart and his capacity are.

89. Understanding Yourself

In temperament and in wit, in judgment and in feeling. No one can be master of himself without first understanding himself. There are mirrors for the face but none for the mind: let discerning reflection on yourself be yours. And when you forget your outward image, keep the inward one, to correct it and improve it. Know the strength of your good sense and your subtlety before you undertake anything; test your temper before you commit yourself. Have your depth measured and your resources weighed for everything.

90. The Art of Living Long: Live Well

Two things soon put an end to life: folly and wickedness. Some lost it because they did not know how to keep it, and others because they did not want to. Just as virtue is its own reward, vice is its own punishment. Whoever lives fast in vice comes to a quick end in two ways; whoever lives fast in virtue never dies. Integrity of the spirit passes into the body, and a good life is held to be long not only in intensity but in extent as well.

91. Never Act with Doubts About Your Prudence

The suspicion of a mistake in the one who acts is already a certainty in the one who watches, especially if he is a rival. If, in the heat of passion, your judgment already has scruples, it will later, when the passion has cooled, condemn the thing as plain folly. Actions undertaken in doubt of their prudence are dangerous; it would be safer to leave them undone. Good sense does not deal in probabilities: it always walks in the noonday light of reason. How can an undertaking turn out well when, even as it is conceived, misgiving is already condemning it? And if the resolution passed most soundly, by an inner vote nemine discrepante, with no one dissenting, often turns out unhappily, what can one expect that began with reason wavering and judgment foretelling ill?

92. Good Sense Above All

I mean in everything. It is the first and highest rule of action and of speech, and the greater and higher the post, the more it is required. A grain of good sense is worth more than a hundredweight of subtlety. It is a way of walking safe, though not so admired, even if the reputation of being sensible is the triumph of fame: it will be enough to satisfy the sensible, whose vote is the touchstone of success.

93. A Universal Man

Made up of every perfection, he is worth many men. He makes living a delight, and shares that enjoyment with those close to him. Variety with perfection is the entertainment of life. It is a great art to know how to make the most of everything good; and since nature, by its eminence, made man a compendium of everything natural, let art make him a universe by the exercise and cultivation of his taste and his understanding.

94. Let No One Fathom Your Resources

If the watchful man wants everyone to revere him, he will not let them sound the bottom of his knowledge or his worth. Let him allow himself to be known, but not comprehended. Let no one find the limits of his capacity, for there is an evident danger of disillusion. Let him never give anyone the chance to get to the bottom of him: the opinion of a man's resources, and the doubt about how far they reach, inspires more veneration than the plain sight of them, however great they are.

95. Know How to Keep Expectation Alive

Keep feeding it. Let much promise more, and let your best action be a bet on greater ones to come. Do not throw everything into the first hand: it is a great trick to know how to hold yourself back, in strength and in knowledge, and keep improving on what you deliver.

96. Of Great Synderesis

It is the throne of reason and the foundation of prudence, and with it success costs little. It is a gift of heaven, and the most to be wished for as the first and the best: the first piece of the armour, and so necessary that no other piece a man lacks earns him the name of lacking as this one does: its want is the one most noticed. All the actions of life depend on its influence, and all of them need its approval, for everything must be done with sense. It consists in an inborn inclination to whatever is most in keeping with reason, always marrying what is most right.

97. Win and Keep a Reputation

It is the usufruct of fame. It costs a great deal, because it is born of eminences, which are as rare as the middling are common. Once won, it is easily kept. It obliges much and achieves more. When it rises to veneration it is a kind of majesty, by the sublimity of its cause and its sphere; but it is the reputation of substance that has always counted.

98. Keep Your Will in Cipher

The passions are the breaches in the mind's wall. The most practical knowledge lies in dissembling; the man who plays with his cards on the table runs the risk of losing. Let the reserve of the cautious compete with the watchfulness of the observant: against the lynxes of reasoning, the cuttlefish of the inner self, which hides in its own ink. Do not let your tastes be known, so that no one can forestall you, some by opposing them, others by flattering them.

99. Reality and Appearance

Things pass not for what they are but for what they seem. Those who look inside are rare, and those who are satisfied with appearances are many. It is not enough to be right with a face that looks like malice.

100. A Man Undeceived

A wise Christian, a philosopher at court. But do not seem it, and still less affect it. Philosophising has fallen into discredit, though it is the highest exercise of the wise. The science of the sensible lives without honour. Seneca brought it into Rome, and for a time it was received at court; now it is taken for an impertinence. But disillusion was always the food of prudence and the delight of integrity.

Aphorisms 101–150

101. Half the World Laughs at the Other Half, and All of Them Are Fools

Everything is good, or everything is bad, depending on whose vote you take. What one man pursues, another persecutes. He is an insufferable fool who wants to regulate everything by his own idea of it. Perfections do not depend on a single man's liking: there are as many tastes as faces, and as varied. Every defect has its devotee. Nor should you lose heart because your things do not please some people, for there will be others to value them; and do not let the applause of these turn your head either, for others will condemn them. The standard of true satisfaction is the approval of men of reputation, who have a vote in that order of things. You do not live by one vote alone, nor by one fashion, nor by one century.

102. A Stomach for Fortune's Great Mouthfuls

In the body of prudence, not the least important part is a large stomach, for a great capacity is made of great parts. A man who deserves greater good fortune is not overcome by the good fortune he has; what is a surfeit to some is hunger to others. There are many in whom any really important dish is wasted by the smallness of their nature, which was neither used to nor born for such sublime posts. Their manners turn sour, and the fumes that rise from borrowed honours go to their heads. They run great risks in high places, and they cannot contain themselves because their luck cannot fit inside them. Let the great man show, then, that he still has room for greater things, and let him take special care to avoid anything that might hint at a narrow heart.

103. Each Man Majestic in His Own Way

Let all your actions, if not a king's, be worthy of one, according to your sphere; let your conduct be royal within the limits of your station, as good sense sets them: sublimity of action, loftiness of thought. In all your affairs be a king by merit, if not in fact, for true sovereignty lies in integrity of conduct, and the man who can be the measure of greatness has no need to envy it. Above all, let those close to the throne take on something of true superiority, and share in the gifts of majesty rather than the ceremonies of vanity, affecting not the imperfection of swollen pride but the lustre of substance.

104. Keep Your Finger on the Pulse of Posts

They vary, and knowing them is a masterly knowledge that calls for watchfulness: some demand courage and others subtlety. Those that depend on rectitude are easier to manage, and those that depend on artifice harder. For the first, a good nature is all you need; for the second, all the watchfulness and sleepless care in the world are not enough. It is a laborious business to govern men, and more so madmen or fools: you need double the sense to deal with someone who has none. The intolerable post is the one that demands the whole man, with set hours and the same matter every day; better are those free of tedium, which join variety with weight, for change refreshes the taste. The most respected are those that depend least on others, or most distantly; and the worst is the one that at the end makes a man sweat at his residencia, the review every Spanish official faced when his term was over, before men and still more before God.

105. Don't Be a Bore

The man of one subject, and the man of one word, is usually tiresome. Brevity flatters, and does better business: it gains by being courteous what it loses by being curt. Good things, if brief, are twice as good; and even bad things, if short, are not so bad. Quintessences achieve more than heaps of rubbish; and it is a common truth that a long-winded man is seldom an intelligent one, not so much in the matter of his arrangement as in the form of his reasoning. There are men who serve more to encumber the universe than to adorn it, lost bits of furniture that everyone pushes out of the way. Let the discerning man avoid being an encumbrance to anyone, and above all to great personages, who live very busy lives; it would be worse to put one of them out of humour than all the rest of the world. What is well said is soon said.

106. Don't Flaunt Your Fortune

Flaunting your rank gives more offence than flaunting your person. Playing the great man is odious; it should be enough to be envied. Esteem is won the less the more it is sought. It depends on the respect of others, and so you cannot take it for yourself; you must deserve it from others and wait for it. Great posts call for an authority fitted to their exercise, without which they cannot be carried out with dignity. Keep the authority you deserve, to meet the substance of your obligations: do not squeeze it, but help it along. All those who play the man of property in office give a sign that they did not deserve it, and that the dignity sits on them like a borrowed coat. If you have to make use of anything, let it be the eminence of your gifts rather than what is adventitious; for even a king is to be revered more for his personal sovereignty than for the outward kind.

107. Don't Show That You Are Pleased with Yourself

Live neither discontented, which is pusillanimity, nor satisfied, which is folly. Self-satisfaction is born in most men of ignorance, and ends in a foolish happiness that may please the taste but does not keep up your credit. Since it cannot see the superlative perfections in others, it is content with any common mediocrity in itself. Misgiving was always useful, and sensible besides, either to see that things go well or to console you when they go badly; for a misfortune is no surprise to the man who already feared it. Homer himself sometimes nods, and Alexander falls from his high estate and from his illusion. Things depend on many circumstances, and what triumphed in one place and on one occasion fails on another. But the incorrigibility of the fool lies in this: the vainest self-satisfaction has turned into a flower in him, and it keeps on spreading its seed.

108. The Short Cut to Being a Real Person: Know How to Keep Company

Dealing with people is very powerful. Habits and tastes are passed on; temperament, and even wit, rub off without your noticing. Let the hasty man, then, seek the company of the composed, and so with the other temperaments; in this way he will come to moderation without force. It is a great skill to know how to adjust yourself. The alternation of contraries makes the universe beautiful and holds it up, and if it makes harmony in the natural world, it makes a greater one in the moral. Use this politic advice in choosing your intimates and your attendants, for by the meeting of extremes you will arrive at a very discerning mean.

109. Don't Be a Fault-Finder

There are men of a fierce temperament who make a crime of everything, and not from passion but by nature. They condemn everyone, some for what they have done, others for what they will do. It shows a spirit worse than cruel, which is base; and they accuse with such exaggeration that they make beams out of motes to put out your eyes with. They are galley masters at every post, who turn what would be Elysium into a galley; and if passion comes into it, they push everything to extremes. A frank and generous nature, on the contrary, finds a way out for everything: if not good intention, then inadvertence.

110. Don't Wait to Be a Setting Sun

It is a maxim of the sensible to leave things before they leave you. Know how to make a triumph of the end itself; for sometimes the sun itself, while it is still shining well, withdraws behind a cloud so as not to be seen sinking, and leaves us wondering whether it has set or not. Dodge your own sunset so as not to burst with humiliations. Do not wait for people to turn their backs on you, for they will bury you alive to feeling and dead to esteem. The watchful man retires the racehorse in good time and does not wait for it to fall in the middle of the race and raise a laugh. Let beauty break the mirror in good time and with cunning, and not with impatience later, when it sees the truth.

111. Have Friends

A friend is a second self. Every friend is good and wise for his friend. Among friends everything turns out well. A man will be worth as much as others want him to be, and for them to want it you must win their tongues by way of their hearts. There is no spell like good service, and the best way to win friendships is to make them. Most of what we have, and the best of it, depends on others. You must live either with friends or with enemies. Every day try to win someone, if not as an intimate then as a well-wisher, for some of them will later become confidants, having passed the test of being chosen well.

112. Win Goodwill

For even the First and Supreme Cause, in its greatest designs, makes provision for it and disposes it. Through the affections you enter the mind. Some trust so much to merit that they neglect to take pains; but the watchful man knows that merit alone is a long way round unless favour helps it along. Goodwill makes everything easy and makes up for everything. It does not always presuppose gifts; it supplies them, such as courage, integrity, wisdom, even discernment. It never sees ugliness, because it would rather not see it. It is usually born of a material likeness, in temperament, nation, kinship, homeland and calling. The formal likeness is loftier: in gifts, obligations, reputation, merits. The whole difficulty is to win it, for it is easily kept. It can be worked for, and you can learn to make use of it.

113. In Prosperity, Provide for Adversity

It is good management to lay in your winter stores in summer, and more conveniently done. Favours are cheap then, and friendships plentiful. It is good to save for bad weather, for adversity is dear and short of everything. Keep a reserve of friends and of grateful people, for one day you will value what you take no notice of now. Baseness never has friends: in prosperity because it does not know them, in adversity because they do not know it.

114. Never Compete

Every claim that meets opposition damages your credit. Competition at once sets out to tarnish, in order to outshine. Few make fair war; rivalry uncovers the faults that courtesy had forgotten. Many have lived with good standing as long as they had no rivals. The heat of opposition revives, or raises from the dead, infamies long buried, and digs up stinks from the past and from the generations past. Competition begins with a manifesto of disgraces, helped by everything it can use and should not; and although insults are sometimes, indeed most of the time, no useful weapons, it makes them the base satisfaction of its revenge, and shakes them out with such a flourish that it knocks the dust of oblivion off old disgraces. Goodwill was always peaceable, and reputation always well disposed.

115. Get Used to the Faults of Those Around You

Get used to them as you would to ugly faces: it pays where you depend on them. There are fierce temperaments you can live neither with nor without. It is a skill, then, to grow accustomed to them, as to ugliness, so that they do not take you by surprise at the dreadful moment. The first time they appal you, but little by little that first horror wears off, and wariness forestalls the vexations, or puts up with them.

116. Always Deal with People of Honour

You can commit yourself to them and commit them to you. Their own sense of obligation is the best guarantee of how they will deal with you, even in a quarrel, for they act as what they are, and it is better to fight with decent people than to triumph over the indecent. There is no good dealing with baseness, because it feels no obligation to integrity; that is why there is never true friendship among the base, nor is their devotion genuine coin, however much it may look it, because it does not rest on honour. Always disown a man without honour, for whoever does not value honour does not value virtue; and honour is the throne of integrity.

117. Never Talk About Yourself

Either you praise yourself, which is vanity, or you blame yourself, which is pusillanimity; and, being a fault of good sense in the one who speaks, it is a punishment for those who listen. If this is to be avoided among intimates, how much more in high places, where you speak in public and any appearance of folly already passes for folly itself. Talking about those present is the same failure of good sense, for the danger of running onto one of two rocks: flattery or blame.

118. Win a Name for Courtesy

That alone is enough to make you admired. Courtesy is the chief part of culture, a kind of spell, and so it wins the favour of all, just as discourtesy wins universal contempt and annoyance. If discourtesy is born of pride, it is hateful; if of coarseness, contemptible. Courtesy should always be more rather than less, but not the same for everyone, for that would become injustice. Among enemies it is held to be a debt, so that their worth may be seen. It costs little and is worth much: everyone who honours is honoured. Gallantry and honour have this advantage, that they stay: the first with the one who shows it, the second with the one who gives it.

119. Don't Make Yourself Disliked

Do not provoke aversion, for it runs on ahead of itself even when no one wants it. There are many who hate for nothing, without knowing how or why. Ill will gets in before obligation. Our angry appetite is quicker and more effective at doing harm than our desiring appetite at doing good. Some go out of their way to be on bad terms with everyone, because they annoy or because they are annoyed; and once hatred takes hold it is, like a bad opinion, hard to wipe out. Men of judgment are feared, slanderers are hated, the presumptuous are found disgusting, mockers are detested, and the eccentric are left alone. Show esteem, then, in order to be esteemed: whoever would be held in regard must hold others in it.

120. Live by Practice

Even knowledge has to be in fashion, and where it is not, you must know how to play the ignorant. Ways of thinking and of tasting change with the times: do not think in the old style, and have modern tastes. In every order of things the taste of the leading men casts the deciding vote. That taste is the one to follow for the time being, and to carry on to eminence. Let the sensible man fit himself to the present, though the past seems better to him, in the dress of the soul as well as of the body. Only in goodness does this rule of living not hold, for virtue must always be practised. Telling the truth and keeping your word are no longer recognised and look like things from another age; and good men seem to have been made for the good old days, though they are still loved; so that, if there are any, they are not the fashion and no one imitates them. Oh, the great misfortune of our century, that virtue should be held strange and malice the common currency! Let the discerning man live as he can, if not as he would like. Let him think better of what fortune has granted him than of what it has denied.

121. Don't Make Business out of No Business

Just as some make a story out of everything, others make business out of everything: they always talk as if it mattered, take everything seriously, and turn it into a quarrel or a mystery. Few annoyances should be taken seriously, or you will get entangled to no purpose. It is getting things backwards to take to heart what you should toss over your shoulder. Many things that were something became nothing when they were let alone, and others that were nothing became a great deal because someone took notice of them. At the start it is easy to put an end to anything, and afterwards it is not. Often the cure itself makes the disease; and letting things be is not the worst rule of living.

122. Command in Word and Deed

It makes room for itself everywhere and wins respect in advance. It tells in everything: in conversation, in public speaking, even in the way a man walks, and even in his glance and in his wishes. To capture hearts is a great victory. It is not born of a foolish boldness, nor of tiresome talk, but of a seemly authority born of a superior temperament and helped by merit.

123. A Man Without Affectation

The more gifts, the less affectation, which is usually a common blemish on them all. It is as tiresome to others as it is painful to the one who keeps it up, for he lives a martyr to care and tortures himself with exactness. Eminences themselves lose their merit by it, because they are judged to have been born of artful force rather than of free nature, and the natural was always more pleasing than the artificial. The affected are taken for foreigners in what they affect. The better a thing is done, the more the effort must be hidden, so that its perfection may be seen to fall of its own accord from nature. Nor in fleeing affectation must you fall into it by affecting to be unaffected. The discerning man should never let on that he knows his merits, for that very carelessness awakens other people's attention. He is twice eminent who holds all perfections in himself and none in his own esteem; by an unlooked-for road he reaches the goal of applause.

124. Be Missed

Few have won so much of people's favour, and if it is the favour of the sensible, it is happiness. Lukewarmness is the usual lot of those whose term is over. There are ways to deserve this reward of affection: eminence in your post and in your gifts is the sure way, and pleasantness the effective one. Make eminence a source of dependence, so that it is plain the office needed the man and not the man the office. Some do honour to their posts; others the posts do honour to. It is no advantage to be made to look good by a bad successor, for that is not being missed outright; it is only that the other man is hated.

125. Don't Be a Green Book

It is a sign that your own fame is worn out when you busy yourself with other people's infamy. Some would like to hide their own stains with other people's, if not to wash them out; or they take comfort from them, which is the comfort of fools. Their breath smells bad, for they are the sewers of the city's filth. In these matters, the more a man digs, the dirtier he gets. Few escape some failing in their origins, in the direct line or the collateral. The faults of the little known are not known. Let the watchful man avoid being a register of infamies, for that is to be a hated record and, though alive, without a soul.⁴

126. The Fool Is Not the One Who Commits Folly, but the One Who Cannot Hide It

If you must seal up your feelings, how much more your failings! All men make mistakes, but with this difference: the shrewd belie the ones they have made, and fools betray the ones they are about to make. Your credit lies in keeping things hidden rather than in what you do; if you cannot be chaste, be cautious. The slips of great men are more observed, like eclipses of the greater lights. Make it the one exception in friendship not to confide your defects to it; and, if it were possible, not even to yourself. But here you can make use of that other rule of living, which is knowing how to forget.

127. Ease in Everything

Despejo, that easy and unencumbered grace, is the life of gifts, the breath of speech, the soul of action, the lustre of lustre itself. Other perfections are the ornament of nature, but ease is the ornament of the perfections themselves: it is admired even in reasoning. It owes most of itself to natural privilege and least to study, for it stands above all training. It goes beyond facility and on to gallantry; it presupposes freedom and adds perfection. Without it all beauty is dead and all grace a disgrace. It runs through courage, discernment, prudence, majesty itself. It is a politic short cut in dispatching business, and a cultivated way out of every entanglement.

128. Greatness of Soul

It is among the chief requirements of a hero, because it kindles every kind of greatness. It heightens taste, enlarges the heart, lifts the thought, ennobles the character and prepares the way for majesty. Wherever it is found it stands out, and sometimes, when the envy of fortune gives it the lie, it bursts to show itself. It expands in the will, even when it is held down in what it can do. Magnanimity, generosity and every heroic gift acknowledge it as their source.

129. Never Complain

Complaint always brings discredit. It serves passion more as an example of daring than it serves compassion as a comfort. It opens the way for the hearer to do the same, and knowledge of the first offence is the excuse for the second. Some, by complaining of past offences, invite those to come, and while they seek a remedy or consolation, they get gloating, and even contempt. It is better policy to celebrate the obligations you owe some, to make them obligations for others; and to repeat the favours of the absent is to ask for those of the present, selling the credit of the one to the other. The watchful man, then, should never publish either slights or defects, only the esteem he has received, which serves to keep friends and to keep enemies in check.

130. Do, and Be Seen to Do

Things pass not for what they are but for what they seem. To be worth something and to know how to show it is to be worth twice as much. What is not seen is as if it were not. Reason itself is not revered where it does not look like reason. The deceived far outnumber the watchful: deceit prevails, and things are judged from the outside. There are things that are very different from what they seem. A good exterior is the best recommendation of inner perfection.

131. A Gallant Nature

Souls have their gallantry, a dash of the spirit, and its gallant deeds leave a heart in fine form. It is not in everyone, because it presupposes magnanimity. Its first concern is to speak well of an enemy, and to act better. Its greatest glory comes when revenge is in its power: it does not throw the chance away, but turns it to better use, converting revenge, at its most victorious, into an unlooked-for generosity. It is good policy too, and even the ornament of reason of state. It never makes a show of its victories, because it makes a show of nothing, and when merit wins them, its candour hides them.

132. Think Again

To appeal for a second hearing is safe, and the more so where the decision is not obviously right. Take time, either to grant or to think better of it: new reasons offer themselves to confirm and strengthen your judgment. If it is a matter of giving, the gift is more prized for its good sense than for the pleasure of its promptness, for what is longed for was always more prized. If you have to refuse, there is room for the manner, and for the No to ripen and grow more seasoned; and most of the time, once that first heat of desire has passed, the rebuff of refusal is not felt afterwards in cold blood. To a man who asks in a hurry, grant late: it is a trick to put his attention off the scent.

133. Better Mad with Everyone than Sane Alone

That is what the politic say. For if everyone is mad, you will lose nothing by it with anyone, and if good sense stands alone it will be taken for madness: so much does it matter to go with the current. The greatest knowledge is sometimes not to know, or to affect not knowing. You have to live with others, and the ignorant are the majority. To live alone you must have either much of God in you or everything of the beast. But I would temper the aphorism and say: better sane with the many than mad alone. Some want to be singular in their fantasies.

134. Have Two of Everything Life Needs

It doubles your living. Your dependence must not be on one thing, nor narrowed to a single thing, however singular. Everything must be doubled, and above all the sources of profit, of favour and of pleasure. The changeableness of the moon passes into everything and sets the limit of all permanence, and still more in what depends on human will, which is brittle. Against frailty keep a reserve, and make it a great rule of the art of living to double the means of good and of comfort: as nature doubled the most important and most exposed members of the body, so art should double the things we depend on.

135. Don't Have the Spirit of Contradiction

It loads you with folly and with tediousness. Good sense will conspire against it. It may well be clever to raise difficulties about everything, but the obstinate man does not escape being a fool. These people make guerrilla war of pleasant conversation, and so they are enemies more to their intimates than to those who have nothing to do with them. In the tastiest morsel you feel the bone that sticks in your throat the most, and contradiction is that bone in good times. They are pernicious fools, who add the wild beast to the dumb one.

136. Get to the Point, and Take the Pulse of Business at Once

Many go off either into the branches of a useless argument or into the leaves of a tiresome wordiness, without coming on the substance of the case. They go a hundred times round a point, tiring themselves and everyone else, and never reach the centre of what matters. This comes from muddled minds that cannot get themselves clear. They waste time and patience on what they ought to leave alone, and afterwards have none left for what they left undone.

137. Let the Wise Man Be Sufficient to Himself

He was all his own possessions, and by carrying himself with him he carried everything. If one universal friend is enough to make up Rome and all the rest of the universe, be that friend to yourself, and you will be able to live alone. Who can be missing to you, if there is no greater judgment and no greater taste than yours? You will depend on yourself alone, and it is the highest happiness to resemble the Highest Being. The man who can live alone like this will have nothing of the brute in him, but much of the wise man, and everything of God.

138. The Art of Letting Things Be

All the more when the sea of public or of private life is roughest. There are whirlwinds in human dealings, tempests of the will; then it is good sense to retire to the safe harbour of letting them pass. Remedies often make ills worse. Leave nature to work in the one case, and morality in the other. The wise doctor must know as much about not prescribing as about prescribing, and sometimes the art consists more in applying no remedies. Let the way to quiet common whirlwinds be to hold your hand and let them settle; to give way to time now will be to win later. A spring is muddied with a little disturbance, and it will not run clear again for your trying, only for your leaving it alone. There is no better remedy for disorders than to let them run their course, for so they fall away of themselves.

139. Know Your Unlucky Days

For there are such days: nothing goes right, and though you change the game, you do not change the bad luck. Within two throws you should recognise it and withdraw, noting whether this is your day or not. Even the understanding has its turns, for no one was ever wise at every hour. It takes luck to reason well, as it does to write a good letter. All perfections depend on their season, and beauty is not always in bloom. Discernment belies itself, now falling short, now overreaching; and everything, to turn out well, must have its day. Just as with some everything goes wrong, with others everything goes right, and with less effort. They find everything done to hand: their wit is in season, their temperament in tune, and their star rising. Then you must make the most of it and not waste the smallest particle. But the judicious man will not pass final sentence that a day is bad because of one mischance he has seen, nor, on the contrary, that it is good, for the one may have been a passing mishap and the other a stroke of luck.

140. Find the Good in Everything at Once

It is the happiness of good taste. The bee goes straight to the sweetness for the honeycomb, and the viper to the bitterness for its venom. Tastes are the same: some go to the best and others to the worst. There is nothing without some good in it, and above all a book, which has been thought about. Yet the temperament of some is so unhappy that among a thousand perfections they will hit on the one defect there is, and censure it and celebrate it: collectors of the filth of other people's wills and minds, loading the margins with notes of defects, which is more the punishment of their bad choice than the employment of their subtlety. They lead an unhappy life, for they always feed on bitterness and make a meal of imperfections. Happier is the taste of others who, among a thousand defects, will hit at once on a single perfection that fell in by chance.

141. Don't Listen to Yourself

There is little profit in pleasing yourself if you do not please others, and as a rule common contempt punishes private satisfaction. The man who pays himself in his own coin is in debt to everyone. Wanting to talk and to hear yourself talk does not turn out well; and if talking to yourself alone is madness, listening to yourself in front of others is madness twice over. It is a failing of great lords to talk with a pet phrase, the "Am I right?" and that "Eh?" which batter their listeners. At every sentence they prick up their ears for approval or flattery, wearing good sense thin. The puffed-up, too, talk with an echo, and since their conversation goes about on the high cork heels of pomp, every word calls for the tiresome rescue of some fool's "Well said!"

142. Never Take the Worse Side out of Obstinacy

Never do it because your opponent got in first and chose the better side. You begin already beaten, and so you will have to give way in disgrace. You will never take good revenge with what is bad. It was your opponent's cunning to get to the better side first, and your folly to oppose him late with the worse. The obstinate in deed are more entangled than the obstinate in word, by as much as there is more risk in doing than in saying. It is the common way of the stubborn to care nothing for the truth, so long as they contradict, nor for profit, so long as they quarrel. The watchful man is always on the side of reason, not of passion, either by getting there first or by improving his position afterwards; for if his opponent is a fool, for that very reason he will change course, cross to the other side, and so take the worse part. To drive him off the better side, the only remedy is to embrace it yourself, for his folly will make him leave it and his obstinacy will be his downfall.

143. Don't Turn to Paradox to Escape the Commonplace

Both extremes bring discredit. Any pursuit that departs from gravity is a branch of folly. Paradox is a kind of deceit that is admired at first, for its novelty and its spice; but afterwards, when the disillusion comes of its turning out so badly, it is left looking very foolish. It is a sort of trickery, and in political matters the ruin of states. Those who cannot reach the heroic by the road of virtue, or do not dare to, take the road of paradox, astonishing fools and proving many sensible men right. It betrays a lack of balance in judgment, and that is why it is so opposed to prudence; and if it is not founded on what is false, it is at least founded on what is uncertain, at great risk to whatever is at stake.

144. Go In with Theirs to Come Out with Your Own

It is a stratagem for getting what you want. Even in heavenly matters Christian teachers recommend this holy cunning. It is an important piece of dissembling, for the advantage the other man imagines serves as bait to catch his will: he thinks his own is leading, when it is only opening the way for someone else's design. Never go in at random, especially where there is deep water and danger. With people whose first word is usually No, too, it is wise to disguise your aim, so that they do not see how hard it is for them to grant, and all the more when you sense their aversion. This counsel belongs among those of second intention, which are all of the most refined subtlety.

145. Don't Show Your Sore Finger

Everything will knock against it. Do not complain of it, for malice always strikes where weakness hurts. Getting piqued will only pique other people's appetite for the sport. Ill intention goes looking for the sore spot that will make you jump: it throws out barbs to find where you feel, and will try a thousand ways until it reaches the quick. The watchful man never lets on, nor reveals his trouble, whether personal or inherited, for even Fortune sometimes takes pleasure in wounding where it will hurt most. She always mortifies the quick; and so you must not reveal either what mortifies you or what revives you: the one so that it will end, the other so that it will last.

146. Look Inside

Things usually turn out to be very different from what they seemed; and ignorance, which got no further than the rind, turns into disillusion when it gets inside. Falsehood always comes first in everything, dragging fools along by their unending commonness. Truth always arrives last, and late, limping along with Time; the sensible keep for it the other half of the faculty that our common mother Nature wisely made double, the second ear. Deceit is very superficial, and the superficial run into it at once. Rightness lives withdrawn into its own interior, to be more prized by its wise and discerning men.

147. Don't Be Out of Reach

No one is so perfect that he does not sometimes need advice. The man who will not listen is a fool past remedy; the most independent must make room for friendly warning, and sovereignty itself must not shut out a readiness to be taught. There are men past remedy because they are out of reach, who fall headlong because no one dares come near to stop them. The most upright man must keep one door open to friendship, and it will be the door that help comes in by; a friend must have the freedom to warn him without constraint, and even to reprove him. Your confidence in him, and your high opinion of his loyalty and prudence, must give him that authority. Not everyone should be allowed easy access to your respect, or even to your trust; but keep in the inner chamber of your reserve the faithful mirror of a confidant, to whom you owe your correction when you are undeceived, and whom you value for it.

148. Have the Art of Conversation

It is where you show that you are a real person. No human activity calls for more watchfulness, because none is more a part of everyday life. Here you win or lose yourself; for if care is needed to write a letter, which is conversation thought over and set down in writing, how much more in ordinary talk, where your discernment is put to a sudden test! Experts take the pulse of the mind by the tongue, and that is why the Sage said, "Speak, if you want me to know you." Some hold that the art of conversation is to have none, and it should indeed be loose, like your clothes, but only among close friends; when it is with people you respect it must have more substance, to show the substance of the person. To get it right you must adjust yourself to the temperament and the wit of those taking part. Do not affect to be a censor of words, or you will be taken for a grammarian, still less a prosecutor of arguments, or everyone will avoid your company and shut you out of conversation. Discernment in speaking matters more than eloquence.

149. Know How to Pass the Blame to Someone Else

To have shields against ill will is a great trick of those who govern. It is not born of incapacity, as malice thinks, but of superior skill, to have someone on whom the criticism of mistakes falls, and the common punishment of gossip. Not everything can turn out well, and not everyone can be pleased. Let there be, then, a figurehead for faults, a target for misfortunes, at the cost of his own ambition.

150. Know How to Sell Your Wares

Their intrinsic goodness is not enough, for not everyone bites into the substance or looks inside. Most people go where there is a crowd; they go because they see others going. It is a great part of the art to know how to give things credit: sometimes by praising them, for praise stirs desire; at others by giving them a good name, which is a great way of exalting them, always without affectation. Reserving a thing for the intelligent alone is a general goad, for everyone thinks himself one of them, and those who do not will be spurred by being left out. Never present your affairs as easy or common, which makes them common rather than accessible. Everyone bites at what is singular, as more appetising, to the taste as to the wit.

Aphorisms 151–200

151. Think Ahead

Think today for tomorrow, and even for many days to come. The greatest foresight is to keep set hours for it. For the forewarned there are no accidents, and for the prepared no tight corners. Do not wait until you are drowning to start reasoning; the reasoning must go on ahead, and the ripeness of second thoughts must forestall the harshest moment. The pillow is a silent Sibyl, and sleeping on a matter is worth more than lying awake under it. Some act first and think afterwards, and that is looking for excuses rather than consequences. Others think neither before nor after. The whole of life should be spent thinking, so as to hold the right course: second thoughts and foresight give you the means of living ahead of time.

152. Never Keep Company with Anyone Who Can Dim Your Lustre

He can do it by being more than you, or by being less. What excels in perfection excels in esteem. He will always play the leading part and you the second, and if any regard comes your way, it will be his leavings. The moon shines out among the stars while she is alone, but once the sun is up she either does not show or vanishes. Never lean on anyone who eclipses you, only on someone who sets you off. That is how the clever Fabulla of Martial's epigram managed to look beautiful, shining among her ugly or slovenly maids. But neither should you risk a pain in the side from the one at your side, nor do others honour at the cost of your own credit. While you are making yourself, go with the eminent; once you are made, go among the middling.

153. Avoid Stepping into Great Vacancies

And if you do commit yourself, be sure that you will do more than fill them. It takes double the worth merely to equal the man before you. Just as it is a clever stroke to have a successor who makes you missed, so it is a subtle one to keep the man who went before you from eclipsing you. A great gap is hard to fill, because the past always seemed better; and even equality will not be enough, because he holds possession as the first. You must add gifts, then, to turn him out of his possession of the higher esteem.

154. Don't Be Easy

Be easy neither in believing nor in liking. Maturity shows in being slow to believe: lying is very ordinary, so let believing be extraordinary. The man who was lightly moved finds himself put to shame afterwards. But you must not let your doubt of another's good faith be seen, for that passes from discourtesy to insult: it treats the speaker as a deceiver or as deceived. And that is not even the worst of it, for not believing is a sign of lying, and the liar suffers two ills: he neither believes nor is believed. Suspending judgment is sensible in the listener, and the teller can refer you for the truth of it to his source. Easiness in liking is a kind of imprudence too, for if men lie with words, they also lie with things, and this deceit by deeds is the more pernicious.

155. The Art of Passion

If you can, let prudent reflection forestall the commonness of impulse. It will not be hard for anyone who is prudent. The first step in falling into a passion is to be aware that you are falling into one, which is to enter it in command of your feelings, measuring the need up to such a point of anger and no further. With this superior wariness, go into a rage and come out of it. Know how to stop well, and in time, for the hardest part of running is the stopping. It is a great proof of judgment to keep your good sense in the throes of madness. Every excess of passion falls away from reason; but with this masterly watchfulness you will never ride reason down, nor trample the bounds of synderesis. To know how to break in a passion, you must always ride with watchfulness for a rein, and you will be the first sensible man ever seen on horseback, if not the last.

156. Friends by Choice

They must pass the examination of discernment and the test of fortune, graduates not only of the will but of the understanding. And though this is the most important success in life, it is the one that gets the least care. Some friendships are made by intrusion, and most by chance. A man is defined by the friends he has, for the wise man never agreed with the ignorant; but enjoying someone's company does not prove intimacy, for it may come more from the good time his wit gives you than from any confidence in his capacity. There are legitimate friendships and illegitimate ones: the illegitimate for pleasure, the legitimate for a fertile yield of good outcomes. Few are friends of the man, and many of his fortune. One friend's good understanding is worth more than many others' good will. Let there be choice, then, and not chance. A wise friend knows how to spare you sorrows, and a foolish one brings them on. And do not wish your friends great fortune, if you do not want to lose them.

157. Don't Be Deceived in People

It is the worst deception, and the easiest. Better to be cheated on the price than on the goods, and nothing needs looking into more closely than people. Understanding things is one thing and knowing people another, and it is great philosophy to fathom men's temperaments and tell their humours apart. Men need studying as much as books do.

158. Know How to Use Your Friends

There is an art of discernment in this. Some are good at a distance and others close at hand, and the man who was perhaps no good for conversation may be good for correspondence. Distance purifies certain defects that were intolerable in his presence. In friends you must look not only for pleasure but for use, for a friend should have the three qualities of the good, or as others say, of being: one, good and true, since a friend is everything. Few are good ones, and not knowing how to choose them makes them fewer. To keep friends is more than to make them. Look for the kind that will last, and even if they are new at first, let it satisfy you that they can grow old. The very best of all are the ones with plenty of salt in them, even if a whole bushel of it is eaten together in the proving. There is no desert like living without friends. Friendship multiplies good things and shares out bad ones; it is the one remedy against adverse fortune, and a breathing space for the soul.

159. Know How to Put Up with Fools

The wise were always bad at suffering fools, for whoever adds to his knowledge adds to his impatience. Great knowledge is hard to satisfy. The greatest rule of living, according to Epictetus, is to bear things, and to this he reduced half of wisdom. If every folly must be tolerated, a great deal of patience will be needed. Sometimes we suffer most from those on whom we most depend, and that matters as an exercise in conquering yourself. From forbearance is born that priceless peace which is happiness on earth. And whoever cannot find the spirit to bear it, let him appeal to retreat into himself, if indeed he can bear even himself.

160. Speak Watchfully

Do it with rivals out of caution, and with everyone else out of decorum. There is always time to send a word out, but never to call it back. Speak as if you were making your will: the fewer the words, the fewer the lawsuits. Practise on what does not matter for what will. Secrecy has a gleam of divinity. The easy talker is never far from being conquered and convinced.

161. Know Your Darling Faults

The most perfect man does not escape them all, and he either marries them or keeps them as mistresses. There are faults of wit, and greater ones in the greater wit, or else they are more noticed. It is not that the man himself does not know them; he loves them. Two evils at once: to be infatuated, and with vices. They are moles on perfection, and they offend outsiders as much as they please their owner. Here is the place for a gallant conquest of yourself, and for giving this happiness to the rest of your lustre; for everyone stumbles there, and when they should be celebrating all the good they admire, they stop where they take offence and blacken that spot, to the discredit of all your other gifts.

162. Know How to Triumph over Rivalry and Ill Will

Contempt is not enough any more, prudent though it is; gallantry does more. No applause is enough for the man who speaks well of the one who speaks ill of him. There is no more heroic revenge than merits and gifts, which defeat envy and torment it at once. Every success you have is another turn of the rack's cords for ill will, and the glory of the envied is the hell of the envious. This is held to be the worst punishment: to make poison out of another's happiness. The envious man does not die once, but as many times as the man he envies lives to the sound of applause, the perpetuity of the one's fame vying with the penalty of the other's pain. The one is immortal for his glories and the other for his torments. The trumpet of Fame, which sounds immortality for the one, proclaims death for the other, and sentences him to hang, suspended in so envious a suspense.

163. Never, Out of Pity for the Unfortunate, Fall Out of Favour with the Fortunate

What is misfortune for some is often fortune for others, for no one would be lucky if many others were not unlucky. It is the mark of the unfortunate to win people's favour, for people like to make up for Fortune's disfavour with their own useless favour; and the man everyone hated in prosperity has been seen pitied by everyone in adversity, the vengeance owed to the man raised up turned to compassion for the man fallen. But let the shrewd man watch how luck shuffles the cards. There are some who never keep company with anyone but the unlucky, and who stand today at the side of the man, now unfortunate, whom they fled yesterday because he was fortunate. It may argue a noble nature, but not shrewdness.

164. Throw a Few Things into the Air

It tests how they will be received, a way of seeing how they go down, and above all things whose success or welcome is in doubt. You make sure of a good outcome, and you leave room either to commit yourself or to withdraw. In this way you sound out people's wills, and the watchful man knows where he stands: the greatest precaution there is in asking, in wanting and in governing.

165. Wage a Good War

The sensible man may be forced to make war, but not a bad one. Everyone must act as who he is, not as others force him to. Gallantry in rivalry is admired. You must fight to win not only in strength but in manner. To win basely is not victory but surrender. Generosity was always superiority. The honourable man never uses forbidden weapons, and forbidden they are when a friendship that has ended is turned to the uses of a hatred begun, for you must never use a confidence for revenge; anything that smells of treachery infects a good name. In persons of rank the least atom of baseness is more remarked; nobility and vileness must stand far apart. Take pride in this: that if gallantry, generosity and loyalty were lost from the world, people would come to look for them in your breast.

166. Tell the Man of Words from the Man of Deeds

This distinction calls for precision like no other, as does the one between friends, between persons and between posts, all of which are very different. Bad words without bad deeds are bad; fair words without good deeds are worse. We no longer dine on words, which are wind, nor live on courtesies, which are a courteous deceit. Catching birds by lamplight is what dazzling really means. The vain take their pay in wind; words should be pledges of deeds, and so they should have the same value. Trees that bear no fruit, only leaves, usually have no heart. It pays to know them, the one kind for profit, the other for shade.

167. Know How to Help Yourself

In great straits there is no better company than a stout heart, and when it weakens, it must be made up from the parts that lie nearest it. Troubles grow smaller for the man who knows how to stand by himself. Do not surrender to Fortune, or she will finish making herself unbearable. Some do little to help themselves in their troubles, and double them by not knowing how to carry them. The man who already knows himself comes to the aid of his weakness with reflection, and the discerning man comes out of everything victorious, even out of his stars.

168. Don't Become a Monster of Folly

Such are all the vain, the presumptuous, the obstinate, the capricious, the cocksure, the eccentric, the posturers, the clowns, the novelty-mongers, the lovers of paradox, the sectarians, and every kind of man out of tune: monsters of impertinence, every one. Any monstrosity of the mind is more deformed than one of the body, because it belies a higher beauty. But who will correct so much common disorder? Where synderesis is lacking, there is no room left for guidance, and what should have been a wary notice of the mockery is an ill-conceived presumption of imagined applause.

169. Take More Care Not to Miss Once than to Hit a Hundred Times

No one looks at the sun in its splendour, and everyone looks at it in eclipse. The common reckoning will not count the times you hit, only the times you miss. The bad are better known for being gossiped about than the good for being applauded, and many were not known at all until they did wrong. All your successes together are not enough to give the lie to a single tiny blot. Let every man undeceive himself: ill will is going to note all his bad deeds and none of his good ones.

170. Keep Something in Reserve in Everything

It secures your importance. You must not spend all your capital, nor bring out all your strength every time; even in knowledge there must be a reserve, which doubles your perfections. There must always be something to fall back on when you are in danger of coming out badly. The relief does more than the charge, because it has the valour and the credit. Good sense always went by the safe road. And in this sense, too, that piquant paradox holds true: the half is more than the whole.

171. Don't Squander Favour

Great friends are for great occasions. Do not spend much confidence on small things; it would waste the goodwill. The sheet anchor is always kept for the last danger. If you use up the great on the little, what will be left for later? Nothing is worth more than those who stand up for you, and nothing is more precious today than favour: it makes and unmakes in the world, to the point of giving men wit or taking it away. What nature and fame have favoured the wise with, fortune has begrudged them. To know how to keep people and hold on to them is worth more than possessions.

172. Don't Get Entangled with a Man Who Has Nothing to Lose

It is fighting on unequal terms. The other man comes in unencumbered, because he has already lost even his shame; he has sold off everything, he has nothing more to lose, and so he flings himself into every impertinence. Never expose your priceless reputation to so cruel a risk: it cost many years to win, and it can be lost in a point of time over a point of honour; one slight can freeze a great deal of splendid sweat. A man who knows his obligations is made careful by having much to lose. Watching over his own credit, he watches his opponent too, and since he engages watchfully, he goes so slowly that he gives prudence time to withdraw in time and put his credit in safety. Not even by winning will he gain what he lost already by exposing himself to loss.

173. Don't Be Made of Glass in Your Dealings

And still less in friendship. Some break very easily, which shows how little substance they have; they fill themselves with offence, and everyone else with annoyance. Their temper is more tender than the pupils of their eyes, for it cannot bear to be touched, in jest or in earnest. A speck offends it; there is no need of a remark. Those who deal with them must go very carefully, always minding their delicacies; you have to humour their airs, because the smallest slight unsettles them. They are usually very much their own men, slaves of their own taste, for whose sake they will trample on everything, idolaters of their little honour. The lover's nature is half diamond, in lasting and in withstanding.

174. Don't Live in a Hurry

Knowing how to space things out is knowing how to enjoy them. Many have life left over when their happiness runs out. They waste their pleasures, because they never enjoy them, and afterwards they would like to turn back, when they find themselves so far ahead. Postilions of living, they add their own headlong temperament to the common gallop of time. They would devour in a day what they could hardly digest in a lifetime. They live ahead of their pleasures and eat up the years to come, and since they go in such a hurry, they soon finish everything. Even in the wish to know there should be measure, so as not to know things badly known. There are more days than delights: in enjoying, go slowly; in doing, quickly. Deeds are good when done; pleasures are bad when done with.

175. A Man of Substance

And the man who is one takes no satisfaction in those who are not. Unhappy is the eminence that is not founded on substance. Not all who look like men are men. There are men of humbug, who conceive chimeras and give birth to frauds; and there are others like them who back them, and who like the uncertain that a humbug promises, because it is much, better than the certain that a truth guarantees, because it is little. In the end their whims turn out badly, because they have no foundation of integrity. Only truth can give a true reputation, and only substance turns to profit. One fraud needs many others, and so the whole building is a chimera, and since it is founded on air, it must come down to earth: a muddle never lives to grow old. Seeing how much it promises is enough to make it suspect, just as what proves too much is impossible.

176. Know, or Listen to Someone Who Knows

You cannot live without understanding, either your own or borrowed. But there are many who do not know that they do not know, and others who think they know when they do not. The failings of folly are past remedy, for since the ignorant do not know themselves, neither do they look for what they lack. Some would be wise if they did not think they were. And so, though oracles of good sense are rare, they sit idle, because no one consults them. Taking counsel does not diminish greatness or contradict capacity; on the contrary, taking good counsel proves it. Argue things out with reason, so that misfortune does not have it out with you.

177. Avoid Familiarity in Your Dealings

Neither use it nor allow it. The man who lets himself down to everyone's level at once loses the superiority his integrity gave him, and esteem after it. The stars keep their splendour by not rubbing shoulders with us. Divinity calls for decorum; every touch of humanity invites contempt. Human things, the more you have of them, the less you think of them, for in being communicated they communicate the imperfections that reserve kept covered. Familiarity suits you with no one: not with your betters, because of the danger, nor with your inferiors, because of the indignity, and least of all with the rabble, who are bold because they are foolish, and failing to see the favour done them, presume it an obligation. Easiness is a branch of commonness.

178. Trust Your Heart

And all the more when it has been proved. Never give it the lie, for it is usually a forecast of what matters most: a household oracle. Many have perished of what they feared; but what use was fearing it without remedying it? Some have a very loyal heart, the advantage of a superior nature, which always forewarns them and sounds the alarm at misfortune, so that it can be remedied. It is not good sense to go out to welcome evils, but it is to go out to meet them and defeat them.

179. Keeping Your Own Counsel Is the Seal of Capacity

A breast without a secret is an open letter. Where there is depth there are deep secrets, for there are wide spaces and inlets where things of weight go down. It comes from a great mastery of yourself, and to conquer yourself in this is the true triumph. Every man you open your breast to is a man you pay tribute to. The health of prudence lies in inner temperance. The dangers to your keeping counsel are other people's probing: contradicting to twist it out of you, throwing barbs to make even the most closed of watchful men jump. What is to be done must not be said, and what is to be said must not be done.

180. Never Steer by What Your Enemy Was Going to Do

The fool will never do what the sensible man judges he will, because he cannot see what suits him; and if he is discerning, he will not do it either, because he will want to give the lie to an intention that has been seen through, and even forestalled. You must think matters through from both sides and turn them over this way and that, giving them two slopes, like a roof. Opinions vary: keep your impartiality watchful, not so much for what will be as for what may be.

181. Never Lie, but Don't Tell Every Truth

Nothing needs a more careful touch than the truth, which is a letting of the heart's blood. It takes as much to know how to tell it as to know how to keep it back. A single lie loses you the whole credit of your integrity. The deceived man is found wanting, and the deceiver found false, which is worse. Not every truth can be told: some because they matter to me, and others because they matter to the other man.

182. A Grain of Daring with Everyone Is an Important Piece of Good Sense

You must moderate your idea of others, so as not to think so highly of them that you fear them; never let your imagination surrender your heart. Some seem great until you deal with them, but dealing with them has done more to undeceive than to impress. No one exceeds the narrow limits of a man. Everyone has his but, some in their wit, others in their temperament. Rank gives an apparent authority; the personal kind seldom goes with it, for luck tends to avenge the superiority of the office with the inferiority of the merits. Imagination always runs ahead and paints things much greater than they are. It conceives not only what there is but what there might be. Let reason correct it, taught by so much experience to see clearly. But folly must not be bold, nor virtue timid. And if confidence has served simplicity well, how much more will it serve worth and knowledge!

183. Don't Grip Your Opinions Too Hard

Every fool is cocksure, and everyone cocksure is a fool; and the more mistaken his opinion, the greater his tenacity. Even when the evidence is on your side, it is frank and generous to give way, for the reason you had does not go unknown, and the gallantry you show is recognised. You lose more by digging in than you could gain by winning: that is defending not the truth but bad manners. There are iron heads, hard to convince and past remedy in their extremes; when crankiness joins cocksureness, they are married indissolubly to folly. Firmness belongs in the will, not in the judgment. There are exceptions, though, where you must hold firm, so as not to be lost and beaten twice over, once in your opinion and again in carrying it out.

184. Don't Stand on Ceremony

Even in a king, affectation in this was celebrated as an oddity. The punctilious man is tiresome, and there are whole nations touched with this nicety. The garment of folly is stitched together from these points: idolaters of their honour, who show how little it rests on, since they fear that anything at all can offend it. It is good to look to the respect due to you, but do not be taken for a great master of compliments. It is quite true that a man without ceremony needs excellent virtues. Courtesy should be neither affected nor despised. The man who stops at every little point of honour does not show himself great.

185. Never Stake Your Credit on a Single Throw

If that one goes wrong, the damage cannot be repaired. It is very possible to miss once, and the first time most of all. A man is not always in form, which is why people speak of a man having his day. Let the second attempt, then, stand surety for the first if the first misses; and if the first hits, it will redeem the second. There must always be recourse to something better, and an appeal to something more. Things depend on chances, and on many of them, and so the happiness of coming out well is rare.

186. Know Faults for What They Are

Do so however much authority they carry. Let integrity never fail to recognise vice, even dressed in brocade; vice is sometimes crowned with gold, but the gilding does not hide the guilt. Slavery does not lose its baseness when the nobility of the man it holds gives it the lie; vices may well be exalted, but they are no excellences. Some see that such a hero had such a flaw, but do not see that it was not the flaw that made him a hero. The example of the great is so persuasive that it recommends even ugliness; flattery has sometimes copied even the ugliness of a face, never noticing that what is overlooked in greatness is loathed in lowliness.

187. Do Everything Pleasant Yourself, and Everything Unpleasant Through Others

By the one you win affection; by the other you turn ill will aside. For great men, doing good is a greater pleasure than receiving it; it is the happiness of their generosity. You seldom give someone displeasure without taking some yourself, either from compassion or from remorse. Higher causes never act without favour or force. Let the good flow from you directly, and the bad at one remove. Have somewhere for the blows of discontent to fall, which are hatred and gossip. The rage of the crowd is like a dog's: not knowing the cause of its hurt, it turns on the instrument, and though the instrument is not chiefly to blame, it pays the penalty at once.

188. Bring Something to Praise

It does credit to your taste, for it shows that your taste was formed on the very best, and so its esteem for what is here can be trusted. Whoever knew how to recognise perfection before will know how to value it afterwards. It gives matter for conversation and for imitation, spreading admirable knowledge ahead of it. It is a politic way of paying courtesy to the perfections in front of you. Others, on the contrary, always bring something to run down, flattering the present by despising the absent. It works for them with the superficial, who do not notice the trick of speaking ill of some to others. Some make it their policy to value the middling of today above the extremes of yesterday. Let the watchful man know these subtle ways of making an approach, and let neither the exaggeration of the one dismay him nor the flattery of the other puff him up; and let him understand that they behave the same way everywhere: they turn their meaning round and always fit themselves to the place they find themselves in.

189. Make Use of What Others Lack

For if it rises to desire, it is the most effective screw there is. The philosophers said privation was nothing, and the politicians that it was everything: the politicians knew it better. Some make a step of other people's desire to reach their own ends. They seize the occasion and whet the appetite with the difficulty of getting. They promise themselves more from the urge of passion than from the lukewarmness of possession; and as the resistance grows, the desire grows more passionate. A great subtlety for gaining your end: keep people dependent.

190. Find Comfort in Everything

Even the useless have theirs: they last for ever. There is no trouble without its consolation. Fools find theirs in being lucky, and there is a saying about the luck of the plain girl. To live long, the trick is to be worth little: the cracked pot is the one that never quite breaks, and wears you out with its lasting. Fortune seems to envy the most important people, for she balances length of life with uselessness in the one and importance with brevity in the other: all who matter will be missing, and the man of no use at all will go on for ever, whether it only seems so or really is so. Fate and death, it seems, have agreed to forget the unlucky man.

191. Don't Take Payment in a Great Deal of Courtesy

It is a kind of deceit. Some need no Thessalian witches' herbs to cast a spell: with a fine sweep of the hat alone they enchant fools, I mean the vain. They set a price on honour and pay in the wind of a few fine words. Whoever promises everything promises nothing, and promising is a slippery floor for fools. True courtesy is a debt; the affected kind is a deceit, and the unusual kind most of all: it is not decency but dependency. They bow not to the person but to his fortune, and flatter not the gifts they recognise but the profits they expect.

192. A Man of Great Peace Is a Man of Long Life

Live, and let live. The peaceable not only live; they reign. You must hear and see, but keep quiet. A day without quarrels makes for a sleepy night. To live long and live with pleasure is to live for two, and that is the fruit of peace. He has everything who cares nothing for what does not matter to him. Nothing is more pointless than taking every point to heart. It is equal folly to let something pierce your heart that does not touch you, and to let what does matter to you get no further than your teeth.

193. Watch the Man Who Goes In with Yours to Come Out with His Own

There is no defence against cunning like alertness. For a deep schemer, a sharp reader. Some make their own business look like someone else's, and without the key to the cipher of intentions you find yourself at every step committed to pulling another man's profit out of the fire, and burning your own hand.

194. Think Sensibly of Yourself and Your Affairs

And all the more at the beginning of life. Everyone thinks highly of himself, and most of all those who are least. Everyone dreams up his own fortune and imagines himself a prodigy. Hope commits itself recklessly, and afterwards experience keeps none of its promises; the undeceiving of true reality becomes the torment of a vain imagination. Let good sense correct such mistakes: it may wish for the best, but it must always expect the worst, so as to take whatever comes with equanimity. It is skill to aim a little high to get the range, but not so high that you lose your aim. When you take up a post, this reform of your idea of things is necessary, for presumption without experience tends to miss the mark. There is no more universal medicine for every folly than sense. Let each man know the sphere of his activity and his station, and he will be able to bring his idea of himself into line with reality.

195. Know How to Value People

There is no one who cannot be someone's teacher in something, and no one who does not excel the man who excels him. Knowing how to get the good out of everyone is useful knowledge. The wise man values everyone, because he recognises the good in each and knows what it costs to do things well. The fool despises everyone, from ignorance of the good and a choice of the worst.

196. Know Your Star

No one is so helpless as not to have one, and if he is unlucky, it is because he does not know it. Some find a place with princes and the powerful without knowing how or why, except that their own luck smoothed the way to favour; all that is left for effort is to help it along. Others find themselves in the good graces of the wise. One man was better received in one nation than in another, better liked in this city than in that. You find more luck, too, in one post and station than in others, and all this with equal, even identical, merits. Luck shuffles how and when she likes. Let each man know his own luck, as he knows his Minerva, for on it hangs losing or winning. Know how to follow it and help it along; do not swap one star for another, which would be to miss the north that the Little Bear, close beside it, calls you to.

197. Never Saddle Yourself with Fools

Whoever does not recognise them is one, and still more whoever recognises them and does not discard them. They are dangerous in casual dealings and ruinous in confidences; and though for a while their own fear and others' care may hold them in, in the end they do something foolish or say it, and if they took their time, it was only to make it more solemn. A man can hardly help another's credit who has none of his own. They are extremely unlucky, which is the burden folly carries on top of itself, and both of them are catching, the folly and the bad luck. There is only one thing less bad about them: though the sensible are of no use to them, they are of great use to the wise, either as information or as warning.

198. Know How to Transplant Yourself

There are nations where you must move away to be valued, and above all in great posts. Homelands are stepmothers to their own eminent men: envy reigns in them as in its native soil, and they remember the imperfections a man began with more than the greatness he has reached. A pin has won esteem by passing from one world to the other, and a piece of glass has brought the diamond into contempt because it travelled. Everything foreign is esteemed, either because it came from far away or because it arrives finished and perfect. We have seen men who were once the scorn of their corner and are now the honour of the world, esteemed by their own people and by strangers: by the one because they look at them from far off, by the other because they are far off. The man who knew the statue as a tree trunk in the orchard will never worship it properly on the altar.

199. Make Your Way by Good Sense, Not by Pushing

The true road to esteem is merit, and if effort is founded on worth, it is a short cut to getting there. Integrity alone is not enough; push alone is unworthy, for things arrive so spattered with mud that they disgust reputation. It lies in a middle course, between deserving and knowing how to introduce yourself.

200. Have Something Left to Wish For

Otherwise you will be happily unhappy. The body draws breath, and the spirit draws desire. If everything were possession, everything would be disillusion and discontent. Even in the understanding there must always remain something to know, for curiosity to feed on. Hope gives life: surfeits of happiness are deadly. In rewarding, the skill is never to satisfy. If there is nothing to desire, there is everything to fear: an unhappy happiness. Where desire ends, fear begins.

Aphorisms 201–250

201. All Who Look Like Fools Are Fools, and So Are Half of Those Who Don't

Folly has made off with the world, and if there is any wisdom in it, it is foolishness beside the wisdom of heaven. But the greatest fool is the one who does not think he is one and pronounces all the others fools. To be wise it is not enough to seem so, still less to seem so to yourself: the man who knows is the one who thinks he does not know, and the man who does not see is the one who does not see that others see. Though the whole world is full of fools, there is not one who thinks he is one, or even suspects it.

202. Words and Deeds Make a Consummate Man

You must say what is very good and do what is very honourable: the one is the perfection of the head, the other of the heart, and both are born of superiority of spirit. Words are the shadow of deeds: words are female, deeds are male. It matters more to be celebrated than to be a celebrator. Saying is easy and doing is hard. Exploits are the substance of living, and maxims its ornament. Eminence in deeds lasts; in words it passes. Actions are the fruit of reflection: the reflective are wise, and the active are heroes.

203. Know the Eminent Men of Your Century

There are not many: one phoenix in a whole world, one Great Captain, as Spain called Gonzalo de Córdoba, one perfect orator, one wise man in a whole century, one eminent king in many. The middling are ordinary in number and in esteem; the eminent are rare in everything, because they call for perfection complete, and the more sublime the category, the harder it is to reach its height. Many have taken the title of Great from Caesar and Alexander, but emptily, for without the deeds the word is no more than a little air: there have been few Senecas, and fame has celebrated a single Apelles among painters.

204. Undertake the Easy as if It Were Hard, and the Hard as if It Were Easy

The first so that confidence does not grow careless, the second so that diffidence does not lose heart. Nothing more is needed for a thing to go undone than to take it as done; and, on the contrary, diligence levels the impossible. Great undertakings should not even be thought about; it is enough to take them on, so that the difficulty, once noticed, does not give rise to hesitation.

205. Know How to Make Use of Contempt

It is a trick for getting things to make light of them. They are not usually found when they are looked for, and later, when you are off your guard, they come to hand of themselves. Since all things here below are shadows of the eternal ones, they share the shadow's property: they flee whoever follows them and pursue whoever flees them. Contempt is also the most politic revenge. A maxim unique to the wise: never defend yourself with the pen, which leaves a trace and ends up more glory to your rival than punishment of his insolence. It is the cunning of the unworthy to set themselves against great men, to win by a crooked road the celebration they never deserved by a straight one; for we should never have heard of many of them if their excellent opponents had taken no notice. There is no revenge like oblivion, which buries them in the dust of their own nothingness. The reckless presume to make themselves eternal by setting fire to the wonders of the world and of the ages, as Herostratus burned the temple at Ephesus. The art of putting down gossip: pay it no attention. Fighting it does you harm, and if it gives the gossip credit, it brings you discredit. It gratifies your rival, too, for even that shadow of a stain tarnishes the greatest perfection, though it does not darken it entirely.

206. Know That There Is a Crowd Everywhere

There is one in Corinth itself, and in the most select family. Everyone finds it out within the doors of his own house. But there is the crowd, and the crowd over again, which is worse: this special crowd has the same properties as the common one, like the pieces of a broken mirror, and it does even more harm. It talks like a fool and censures impertinently, a great disciple of ignorance, godfather of folly and ally of gossip. Pay no attention to what it says, and still less to what it thinks. It is important to know it so as to be free of it, whether as a part of it or as its object. For every folly is commonness, and the crowd is made of fools.

207. Use Restraint

You must keep the firmest hold on the case when it comes by chance. The impulses of the passions are the slippery places of good sense, and there lies the danger of losing yourself. A man goes further in a moment of fury or delight than in many hours of indifference. A short run sometimes leaves him running from shame for the rest of his life. Another man's astute intention lays out these temptations for your prudence, to spy out the land, or the mind. It uses screws of this kind to wring out secrets, and they tend to drain the deepest store. Let restraint be your counter-trick, and above all in sudden moments. Much reflection is needed to keep a passion from bolting, and he is very sensible who is sensible on horseback. The man who sees the danger goes carefully. A word that seems light to the man who throws it seems heavy to the man who receives it and weighs it.

208. Don't Die of a Fool's Failing

As a rule the wise die lacking good sense, while fools, on the contrary, die stuffed with counsel. To die a fool's death is to die of thinking too much. Some die because they feel, and others live because they do not. And so some are fools because they do not die of grief, and others are fools because they do. He is a fool who dies of understanding too much. Thus some die of understanding, and others live by not understanding; but though many die of folly, few fools die.

209. Free Yourself from the Common Follies

It is good sense of a very special kind. They are well entrenched by custom, and some who never surrendered to private ignorance could not escape the common kind. It is common for no one to be content with his lot, even the greatest, nor discontented with his wit, even the worst. Everyone covets other men's happiness, discontented with his own. The people of today praise the things of yesterday, too, and the people here the things over there. Everything past seems better, and everything distant is esteemed more. The man who laughs at everything is as much a fool as the man who frets at everything.

210. Know How to Handle the Truth

It is dangerous, but the honourable man cannot help telling it, and there art is needed. The skilful physicians of the soul invented the way of sweetening it, for when it comes to undeceiving, it is the quintessence of bitterness. Good manner shows its skill here: with the same truth one man flatters and another batters. Speak to those present in terms of those past. With a quick listener it is enough to show the corner of the card; and when nothing is enough, the time has come to fall silent. Princes are not to be cured with bitter things; that is what the art of gilding disillusion is for.

211. In Heaven All Is Joy, in Hell All Is Sorrow

In the world, which lies between, there is some of each. We stand between two extremes, and so we share in both. Lots take turns: not everything is to be happiness, nor everything adversity. This world is a zero: by itself it is worth nothing; set beside Heaven, a great deal. Indifference to its changes is good sense, and novelty is not for the wise. Our life grows more and more entangled, like the plot of a play, and at the end it comes untangled. Take care, then, to end well.

212. Always Keep the Last Tricks of the Art for Yourself

It is the way of great masters, who use their subtlety in the very teaching of it. You must always stay the superior, and always the master. You must use art in passing on art; never drain the spring of teaching dry, any more than the spring of giving. That is how you keep both reputation and dependence. In pleasing and in teaching, observe that great lesson: always keep admiration fed and perfection a step ahead. Keeping something in reserve in every matter was a great rule for living and for winning, and most of all in the highest posts.

213. Know How to Contradict

It is a great trick for probing, not to get yourself entangled but to entangle others. It is the one screw that makes the feelings jump. Lukewarm belief is an emetic for secrets, the key to the most closed breast. With great subtlety it makes a double test, of the will and of the judgment. A shrewd disdain for another man's mysterious word hunts down the deepest secrets, coaxes them gently up mouthful by mouthful to the tongue, and brings them at last into the nets of an artful deceit. Restraint in the watchful man makes the other throw off his own reserve, and so reveals what he feels, where otherwise his heart was past searching. Feigned doubt is the subtlest picklock curiosity has for finding out whatever it wants. And even in learning, it is the pupil's trick to contradict the master, who then commits himself more earnestly to declaring the truth and grounding it; so that moderate opposition gives occasion for complete teaching.

214. Don't Make One Folly Two

It is very usual, in patching up one, to commit four others. Excusing one impertinence with a greater one is of the breed of lying, or else lying is of the breed of folly, for to sustain one it needs many. The defence of a bad case was always worse than the case; worse than the evil itself is not knowing how to cover it. Imperfections pay this rent: each one puts many others out at interest. The wisest man may fall into one slip, but not into two; and into that one in passing, never to stay.

215. Watch the Man Who Comes on Second Intention

It is the trick of the man of affairs to put the will off its guard in order to attack it, for it is won over once it is talked over. Such men disguise their aim in order to achieve it, and the aim puts itself second so as to come first in the execution: the shot is made sure by going unnoticed. But let attention not sleep while intention lies so wide awake; and if intention makes itself second to dissemble, let attention make itself first to recognise it. Let caution notice the artifice with which he approaches, and mark the points he throws out, one after another, to come round at last to the point of his pretension. He proposes one thing and aims at another, and wheels round with subtlety to hit the target of his intention. Know, then, what you are granting him, and sometimes it will be wise to let him understand that you have understood.

216. Have the Gift of Expression

It is not only a freedom of speech but an ease of thought. Some conceive well and give birth badly, for without clarity the children of the soul, its concepts and decisions, never come to light. Some have the capacity of those jars that take in much and give out little. Others, on the contrary, say even more than they mean. What resolution is in the will, expression is in the understanding: two great eminences. Clear wits are admired; confused ones have been venerated for not being understood, and sometimes obscurity is advisable so as not to be common. But how will others form any idea of what they hear from you, if no idea in your own mind answers to what you say?

217. Don't Love or Hate for Ever

Trust your friends today as if they will be your enemies tomorrow, and the worst ones; and since this happens in reality, let it happen in your precautions. Never hand weapons to deserters from friendship, for they make the cruellest war with them. With enemies the opposite: always an open door to reconciliation, and let it be the door of gallantry, which is the safest. The revenge of earlier days has sometimes tormented a man later, and the pleasure of the ill turn he did becomes his sorrow.

218. Never Act out of Obstinacy, but out of Watchfulness

All obstinacy is an abscess, a great daughter of passion, which never did anything right. There are some who turn everything into skirmishing, bandits of social life: whatever they carry out they would like to be a victory, and they do not know how to proceed in peace. These are pernicious in command and government, because they make a faction of government, and make enemies of those they should have made their children. They want to arrange everything by scheme and obtain it as the fruit of their artifice; but once the others discover their perverse humour, they at once set themselves against them and try to block their chimeras, and so they get nothing. They carry off bellyfuls of vexation, and everyone helps their disgust along. Their judgment is impaired, and sometimes their heart is damaged too. The way to deal with such monsters is to flee to the antipodes, for the barbarity of the people there will be easier to bear than the ferocity of these.

219. Don't Be Taken for a Man of Artifice

Though it is no longer possible to live without it. Be prudent rather than astute. Everyone likes plain dealing, but not everyone practises it at home. Let sincerity not run to the extreme of simplicity, nor shrewdness to cunning. Better to be revered as wise than feared as wary. The sincere are loved, but deceived. Let the greatest artifice be to hide the artifice, for it is taken for deceit. Plainness flourished in the age of gold, and malice flourishes in this age of iron. The name of a man who knows what he has to do is honourable and inspires confidence, but the name of a man of artifice is sophistical and breeds suspicion.

220. When You Cannot Wear the Lion's Skin, Put On the Fox's

Knowing when to give ground to the times is a way of gaining it. The man who gets what he set out to get never loses reputation. Where strength fails, skill. By one road or the other: the king's highway of courage or the short cut of artifice. Craft has done more than force, and the wise have beaten the brave more often than the other way round. When you cannot get a thing, that is when contempt comes in.

221. Don't Be a Troublemaker, Either to Entangle Yourself or to Entangle Others

There are men who are stumbling blocks to decorum, their own and other people's, always on the brink of folly. You run into them very easily, and break with them unhappily. They cannot get through a day without a hundred vexations. Their humour is brushed against the grain, and so they contradict everyone and everything. They have put their judgment on like shoes on the wrong feet, and so they condemn everything. But the greatest trials of good sense are those who do nothing well and speak ill of everything, for there are many monsters in the broad country of impertinence.

222. A Man of Restraint Is the Proof of a Prudent One

The tongue is a wild beast: once it gets loose, it is very hard to chain up again. It is the pulse of the soul, by which the wise know its condition; here the watchful feel the movements of the heart. The trouble is that the man who should be most restrained is the least. The wise man spares himself vexations and entanglements, and shows how much a master of himself he is. He goes circumspectly, a Janus in weighing, an Argus in verifying. Momus, the god of fault-finding, who complained that man had been made without a little window in his breast, would have done better to complain that there were no eyes in the hands.

223. Don't Be Too Singular, Either from Affectation or from Carelessness

Some have a remarkable singularity, with mannered ways of acting that are more defects than distinctions. And just as some people are well known for some singular ugliness of face, so these are for some excess in their bearing. Singularity serves only as a mark against you, an impertinent peculiarity that stirs laughter in some and annoyance in others.

224. Know How to Take Things

Never take them against the grain, however they come. Everything has a right side and a wrong side. The best and most favourable thing wounds if you take it by the blade; and on the contrary, the most hostile defends you if you take it by the hilt. Many things have been a source of pain that would have been a source of pleasure if their advantages had been considered. In everything there are conveniences and inconveniences: the skill lies in knowing how to light on the advantage. The same thing shows very different colours when looked at in different lights: look at it in the light of happiness. Do not swap the bridles of good and bad. That is why some find pleasure in everything, and others sorrow. It is a great defence against the reverses of fortune, and a great rule for living, in every season and every post.

225. Know Your King Defect

No one lives without one, the counterweight to his outstanding gift; and if inclination favours it, it seizes power like a tyrant. Begin to make war on it by publishing your vigilance against it, and let the first step be the manifesto, for once it is known, it will be beaten, and all the more if the man concerned forms the same idea of it as those who notice it. To be master of yourself, you must stay on top of yourself. Once this captain of the imperfections surrenders, all the rest will capitulate.

226. Take Care to Oblige

Most people do not speak or act as who they are, but as they are obliged to. Anyone at all will do to persuade people of evil, because evil is readily believed, even when it is sometimes incredible. The most and the best of what we have depends on other people's regard. Some are content to have reason on their side; but that is not enough, for it must be helped along with diligence. Obliging people sometimes costs very little and is worth a great deal. Words buy deeds. There is no piece of furniture so humble in this great house of the universe that it will not be needed once a year; and though it is worth little, it will be badly missed. Everyone speaks of a thing according to his feeling for it.

227. Don't Be a Man of First Impressions

Some marry the first account they hear, so that all the rest are concubines; and since the lie always gets there first, there is no room left afterwards for the truth. Neither the will should be filled up with the first object nor the understanding with the first proposition, for that is shallowness. Some have the capacity of a new jar, which the first smell takes over, of bad liquor or good. When this shallowness becomes known, it is pernicious, for it gives a footing to malicious enterprise. The ill-intentioned are quick to dye credulity their own colour. Always leave room for review: let Alexander keep the other ear, as he did, for the other side. Leave room for a second report, and a third. Being impressionable betrays incapacity, and it is not far from being passionate.

228. Don't Be Known as an Evil Tongue

Still less earn the reputation, which is to have a name for blackening names. Do not be witty at other people's expense, which is more hateful than difficult. Everyone takes revenge on such a man by speaking ill of him, and since he is one and they are many, he will sooner be vanquished than they convinced. Evil should never be relished, nor retailed. The backbiter is hated for ever, and though great personages sometimes have dealings with him, it will be more for the taste of his jeering than for any esteem of his good sense. And the man who speaks ill always hears worse.

229. Know How to Divide Your Life Discerningly

Do it not as occasions come along, but by foresight and choice. A life without rest is toilsome, like a long journey without inns. A learned variety makes it happy. Spend the first stage of the good life talking with the dead: we are born to know and to know ourselves, and books, faithfully, make us real persons. Spend the second stage with the living, seeing and noting all that is good in the world; not everything is found in one land; the universal Father shared out his gifts, and sometimes gave the richest dowry to the ugliest. Let the third stage be wholly your own: the last happiness, to philosophise.

230. Open Your Eyes in Time

Not all who see have opened their eyes, nor do all who look see. Catching on late is no remedy, only a grief. Some begin to see when there is nothing left to see: they undid their houses and their fortunes before they had made themselves. It is hard to give understanding to someone who has no will, and harder to give will to someone who has no understanding. Those around them play with them as with the blind, to the laughter of the rest. And because they are deaf to hearing, they do not open their eyes to see. But there is no lack of people who foster this insensibility, whose own being depends on their not being. Unhappy the horse whose master has no eyes: it will never grow fat.

231. Never Let Things Be Seen Half Done

Let them be enjoyed in their perfection. All beginnings are shapeless, and the image of that deformity stays with you afterwards: the memory of having seen a thing imperfect keeps you from enjoying it finished. Taking in a great object at one stroke, though it hampers your judgment of the parts, satisfies the taste on its own account. Before a thing is everything, it is nothing, and when it begins to be, it is still deep inside its nothing. Watching the most delicate dish being cooked turns the stomach sooner than it whets the appetite. Let every great master take care, then, not to let his works be seen in embryo. Let him learn from nature not to show them until they are fit to be seen.

232. Have Something of the Man of Affairs

Let it not all be speculation; let there be action too. The very wise are easily deceived, for though they know the extraordinary, they do not know the ordinary business of living, which is more necessary. Contemplating sublime things leaves them no room for everyday ones; and since they do not know the first thing they should, the thing everyone else has down to a hair, they are either wondered at or taken for ignoramuses by the superficial crowd. Let the wise man take care, then, to have something of the man of affairs, enough not to be deceived, or even laughed at. Be a man of the practicable, which though not the highest thing is the most necessary in living. What is knowledge for, if it is not practical? And knowing how to live is the true knowledge today.

233. Don't Aim Wide of People's Taste

That is to give pain in place of pleasure. Some annoy with the very thing they think will oblige, because they do not understand temperaments. Some acts are flattery to one man and offence to another, and what was believed a service was an insult. Sometimes it has cost more to give displeasure than it would have cost to give pleasure. They lose both the thanks and the gift, because they lost their compass for pleasing. If you do not know another man's temperament, you can hardly satisfy him; hence some have thought they were speaking a eulogy and spoke an insult, which was a well-deserved punishment. Others think they are entertaining with their eloquence, and batter the soul with their loquacity.

234. Never Trust Your Reputation Without a Pledge of Another's Honour

Arrange to share the profit if there is silence and the damage if there is indiscretion. In matters of honour the dealing must always be a partnership, so that each man's own reputation makes him take care of the other's. You should never trust; but if you ever do, let it be with such art that prudence can give way to caution. Let the risk be common and the cause mutual, so that the man who knows himself a party to it cannot turn witness against you.

235. Know How to Ask

Nothing is harder for some, nor easier for others. There are some who cannot refuse; with them no picklock is needed. There are others whose first word at every hour is No; with them you need skill. And with everyone, timing: catching their spirits when they are cheerful, after a meal for the body or one for the mind. Unless the watchfulness of a wary listener forestalls the subtlety of the man who is trying, days of rejoicing are days of favour, for the joy overflows from within to without. Do not approach when you see someone else refused, for the fear of saying No has been lost. There is no good throw after sadness. Obliging a man beforehand is a sound exchange, except where baseness fails to pay it back.

236. Make an Obligation Beforehand of What Would Have Been a Reward Afterwards

It is the skill of great politicians. Favours granted before they are earned are the mark of men who know what obligation is. A favour granted in advance has two eminences: by the promptness of the giver it obliges the receiver the more. The same gift that afterwards is a debt is beforehand a pledge. It is a subtle way of transforming obligations, for the one that should have lain on the superior, to reward, falls on the obliged, to repay. This holds with people who know what obligation is, for with base men it would be putting on a bridle rather than a spur, to pay the fee of honour in advance.

237. Never Share Secrets with Your Betters

You will think you are sharing pears, and you will find you are sharing stones. Many have perished by being confidants. They are like a crust used as a spoon, which is eaten along with the soup. When a prince confides in you, it is not a favour, it is a tax. Many break the mirror because it reminds them of their ugliness. A man cannot bear the sight of the one who could see him as he was, and the man who saw him in a bad light is never seen in a good one. No one should be too much obliged to you, and the powerful least of all. If they must be, let it be rather by benefits you did than by favours you received. Above all, the confidences of friendship are dangerous. The man who told his secrets to another made himself his slave, and in sovereigns that is a violence that cannot last. They want to buy back their lost freedom, and to do it they will trample on everything, even reason. Secrets, then: neither hear them nor tell them.

238. Know the Piece You Are Missing

Many would be very real persons if they did not lack a little something, without which they never reach the height of complete being. You notice in some that they could be a great deal if they attended to very little. Some lack seriousness, and it tarnishes great gifts; others lack gentleness of temper, a want their intimates soon feel, and more so in persons of rank. In some you would wish for drive, and in others restraint. All these flaws, if they were noticed, could easily be made good, for care can make custom a second nature.

239. Don't Be Too Sharp

It matters more to be prudent. To know more than you should is to blunt your edge, for subtleties usually snap. Settled truth is safer. It is good to have understanding, but not chatter. Too much reasoning is a branch of quarrelling. Better a good, substantial judgment that does not reason further than matters.

240. Know How to Use Folly

The wisest man sometimes plays this card, and there are occasions when the best knowledge lies in showing no knowledge. You must not be ignorant, but you may pretend to be. With fools it matters little to be wise, and with madmen to be sane: you must speak to each in his own language. The fool is not the man who affects folly but the man who suffers from it. Plain folly is folly; the double kind is not, for artifice reaches even this far. To be well liked, the only way is to put on the skin of the simplest of beasts.

241. Put Up with Jokes, but Don't Make Them

The first is a kind of gallantry, the second an entanglement. The man who loses his temper at a party has a great deal of the beast in him, and shows more. A joke is pleasant, and to know how to take one well shows capacity. Whoever lets himself be needled invites more needling. Drop jokes while they are at their best, and the safest thing is not to start them: the gravest earnest was always born of jest. Nothing needs more watchfulness and skill. Before you begin, you must know how far the temperament of the person will bear it.

242. Follow Up Your Advantage

Some put everything into beginning, and finish nothing. They invent, but do not carry on: an unstable temperament. They never win praise, because they carry nothing through; with them everything stops at stopping. In others it comes from impatience of spirit, the failing of Spaniards, as patience is the advantage of the people of the Low Countries. These finish things; the others finish with them. They sweat until the difficulty is overcome, and are content with overcoming it; they do not know how to carry the victory through; they prove that they can, but will not. But it is always a defect, of incapacity or of fickleness. If the work is good, why is it not finished? And if bad, why was it begun? Let the shrewd man kill his game, then, and not spend everything on putting it up.

243. Don't Be All Dove

Let the craft of the serpent take turns with the candour of the dove. Nothing is easier than to deceive an honourable man. The man who never lies believes much, and the man who never deceives trusts much. Being deceived does not always come of being a fool; sometimes it comes of being good. Two kinds of people are well forewarned against harm: those who have learned from it, at great cost to themselves, and the astute, at great cost to others. Let shrewdness be as extreme in suspicion as cunning is in intrigue, and do not try to be so good a man that you give the other the chance to be a bad one. Be a mixture of dove and serpent: not a monster, but a prodigy.

244. Know How to Oblige

Some turn their own favour into someone else's, and seem, or give it to be understood, that they are conferring a kindness when they are receiving one. There are men so clever that they honour by asking, and turn their own profit into another man's honour. They arrange things so that it looks as if others are doing them a service when they give to them, reversing the order of obligation by an extraordinary politics. At the least they leave it in doubt who is doing whom a favour. They buy the best at the price of praise, and out of showing pleasure in a thing they make honour and flattery. They put courtesy in pawn, making a debt of what should have been their own gratitude. In this way they change obligation from the passive to the active voice, better politicians than grammarians. It is a great subtlety; but a greater one would be to see through it, undoing the fool's trade, handing them back their honour and each taking back his own profit.

245. Think Now and Then Singularly, off the Common Road

It argues a superior endowment. Do not esteem the man who never opposes you, for that is no sign that he loves you, only that he loves himself. Do not let flattery deceive you into paying for it; condemn it instead. Count it to your credit, too, to be gossiped about by some, and above all by those who speak ill of all good men. Be sorry if your work pleases everyone, for it is a sign that it is not good: perfection belongs to the few.

246. Never Give Satisfaction to Someone Who Did Not Ask for It

And even when it is asked for, it is a kind of offence if it is overdone. To excuse yourself before there is occasion is to accuse yourself, and to be bled in good health is to beckon to illness, and to malice. An excuse given in advance wakes the suspicion that was asleep. Nor should the sensible man let on that he knows of another's suspicion, which is going out to look for the insult. In that case he should try to give it the lie with the integrity of his conduct.

247. Know a Little More, and Live a Little Less

Others reason the other way round. Good leisure is worth more than business. Nothing is ours but time. Where does a man live who has no room in his day? It is as unhappy to spend precious life on mechanical tasks as on too many sublime ones. Do not load yourself with occupations, nor with envy: that is to trample on living and smother the spirit. Some extend this to knowledge, but you do not live if you do not know.

248. Don't Let the Last Speaker Carry You Off

There are men of the last report, for impertinence runs to extremes. Their feelings and their wishes are of wax: the last one seals them and wipes out all the others. These are never won, because they are lost just as easily. Everyone dyes them his own colour. They are bad as confidants, children all their lives; and so, with changing judgments and feelings, they go wavering, always lame of will and of judgment, leaning now one way and now the other.

249. Don't Begin Life Where It Should End

Some take their rest at the start and leave the toil for the end. The essential must come first, and afterwards, if there is room, the accessory. Others want to triumph before they fight. Some begin learning with what matters least, and leave the studies that bring credit and use for when their life is running out. Another has not yet begun to make his fortune when he is already vanishing. Method is essential to knowing how to live, and to being able to.

250. When Should You Reason Backwards? When They Speak to You in Malice

With some, everything must go the opposite way. Yes is No, and No is Yes. Speaking ill of a thing is taken as esteem for it, for the man who wants it for himself discredits it to others. Not all praising is speaking well, for some, so as not to praise the good, praise the bad as well; and for the man to whom no one is bad, no one will be good.

Aphorisms 251–300

251. Use Human Means as if There Were No Divine, and Divine as if There Were No Human

A master's rule; it needs no comment.

252. Neither Wholly Your Own nor Wholly Other People's

Either is a common tyranny. From wanting to be all your own it follows at once that you want everything for yourself. Such people will not yield in the smallest thing, nor give up one point of their comfort. They oblige few, they trust to their luck, and their prop usually gives way under them. It is sometimes wise to belong to others so that others may belong to you, and whoever holds a public post must be a public slave, or else "lay down the honour along with the onus", as the old woman will tell Hadrian, the emperor who said he had no time to hear her. Others, on the contrary, are wholly other people's, for folly always runs to excess, and here an unhappy one: they have no day, not even an hour, of their own, with such an excess of others that one of them was called "Everybody's". It is the same even with understanding: they know for everyone and are ignorant for themselves. Let the watchful man understand that no one is looking for him, only for what they can get from him, or through him.

253. Don't Make Your Meaning Too Plain

Most people do not esteem what they understand, and what they cannot grasp they venerate. To be esteemed, things must cost. You will be celebrated when you are not understood. Always show yourself wiser and more prudent than the man you are dealing with requires for his opinion of you, but in proportion rather than to excess. And though with people of understanding sound sense counts in everything, with most people some loftiness is necessary. Give them no room for criticism; keep them busy understanding. Many praise what they could give no reason for if they were asked. Why? They venerate everything recondite as a mystery, and celebrate it because they hear it celebrated.

254. Don't Despise a Small Ill, for It Never Comes Alone

Ills go in chains, and so do good fortunes. Luck and ill luck usually go where there is most of them already; and the reason is that everyone flees the unlucky man and draws close to the fortunate one. Even the doves, for all their simplicity, fly to the whitest tower. Everything comes to fail the unlucky man: he fails himself, and so do his reason and his comfort. Do not wake misfortune when it is asleep. A slip is a small thing, but after it comes the fatal fall, and there is no knowing where it will end; for just as no good was ever wholly complete, so no ill is ever wholly over. For the ill that comes from heaven there is patience; for the ill that comes from the ground, prudence.

255. Know How to Do Good

Do it a little at a time, and often. What you commit the other man to must never exceed what he can repay. Whoever gives much does not give; he sells. Do not wring gratitude dry, for once it sees it can never pay, it will break off all dealings. To lose many people you need do nothing more than oblige them too much. To avoid paying they withdraw, and from being obliged they turn into enemies. The idol would never want the sculptor who carved it standing before it, nor the debtor his benefactor before his eyes. There is great subtlety in giving: let it cost you little and be much desired, so that it is esteemed the more.

256. Always Go Forearmed

Be ready for the discourteous, the obstinate, the conceited and every other kind of fool. You run into many of them, and good sense lies in not running up against them. Arm yourself each day with resolutions before the mirror of your watchfulness, and so you will win every bout with folly. Go in knowing the case, and you will not expose your reputation to common accidents: a man forearmed with good sense will not be beaten by impertinence. Human dealings are a hard course to steer, being full of the reefs of discredit; the safe thing is to steer clear, taking counsel in cunning from Ulysses. An artful sidestep is worth a great deal here. Above all, take the road of gallantry, which is the only short cut out of entanglements.

257. Never Come to an Open Breach

Your reputation always comes out of one with a broken head. Anyone will do for an enemy, but not for a friend. Few can do good, and almost everyone can do harm. The eagle is not safe nesting even in Jupiter's own lap, as Aesop tells, on the day it falls out with a beetle: the hidden enemies, who were only waiting for their chance, use the declared enemy's claw to stoke the fire. Friends turned sour make the worst enemies; they charge their own failing, their old fondness, to the other man's defects. Of the onlookers, each speaks as he feels and feels as he wishes, and all condemn you, either at the beginning for want of foresight or at the end for want of patience; and always for want of good sense. If a parting is unavoidable, let it be excusable, by favour grown lukewarm rather than by fury boiling over. And this is where that saying about a fine retreat fits well.

258. Find Someone to Help You Carry Your Misfortunes

Never be alone, least of all in danger, or you will take the whole of the hatred on yourself. Some think to carry off the whole of the authority, and they carry off the whole of the gossip instead. This way you will have someone to excuse you, or to help you bear the ill. Neither Fortune nor the crowd dares so readily to take on two; and that is why the shrewd doctor, having missed the cure, does not miss finding someone who, under the name of a consultation, will help him carry the coffin. The weight is shared and so is the woe, for misfortune borne alone doubles until it cannot be borne.

259. Forestall Injuries and Turn Them into Favours

It is shrewder to avoid them than to avenge them. It is great skill to make a confidant of the man who was to have been your rival, and to turn into bulwarks of your reputation those who were aiming their shots at it. Knowing how to oblige is worth a great deal: fill a man's time with gratitude and you leave him none for injury. And it is knowing how to live, to turn what were to have been pains into pleasures. Make a confidant of ill will itself.

260. You Will Be No One's Wholly, and No One Will Be Wholly Yours

Neither blood is enough, nor friendship, nor the most pressing obligation, for there is a great difference between handing over your confidences and handing over your affection. The closest union admits exceptions, and the laws of fine friendship are not offended by them. A friend always keeps some secret to himself, and even a son holds something back from his father. Some things are kept from some people and shared with others, and the other way round, so that you come to grant everything and to deny everything, by telling apart the terms of each relation.

261. Don't Persist in Folly

Some men make an entanglement of a blunder, and because they began by going wrong, they think it constancy to go on. In the inner court of conscience they accuse themselves of their error, and in the outer court they excuse it; and so, if when they began their folly they were marked down as careless, by persisting in it they are confirmed as fools. Neither a rash promise nor a mistaken resolution creates any obligation. Yet in this way some carry on with their first crudeness and push their narrowness further: they want to be constant in their impertinence.

262. Know How to Forget

It is more luck than art. The things most fit to be forgotten are the ones best remembered. Memory is not only a churl, failing us when it was most needed, but a fool as well, turning up when it is not wanted: in whatever will give pain it is long-winded, and in whatever should give pleasure, careless. Sometimes the cure of an ill lies in forgetting it, and it is the cure we forget. It is wise, then, to train memory to such convenient habits, for it is enough by itself to give you happiness or hell. The contented are the exception, who in their state of innocence enjoy their simple happiness.

263. Many Pleasant Things Are Better Not Owned

You enjoy them more as someone else's than as your own. The owner has the good of them on the first day; all the rest are for strangers. Other people's things are enjoyed with double relish, that is, without the risk of damage and with the pleasure of novelty. Everything tastes better to the man who goes without: even another man's water passes for nectar. Owning things, besides lessening the enjoyment, increases the annoyance, both of lending them and of not lending them. It serves only to keep them for others, and you make more enemies by it than grateful friends.

264. Have No Careless Days

Luck likes to play a practical joke, and it will ride over every chance to catch you off guard. Wit, good sense and courage must always be ready for the test; even beauty, for the day it grows confident will be the day of its discredit. Care has always failed just when it was most needed, for not thinking is the foot thrust out that trips a man into ruin. It is also a stratagem of other people's watchfulness to catch perfections off guard, for the strict examination of their worth. The days of display are known by now, and cunning lets them pass; but the day it was least expected, that is the day it chooses to try what you are worth.

265. Know How to Put Your People on Their Mettle

A commitment at the right moment has made real persons of many, just as drowning makes swimmers. In this way many discovered their courage, and even their knowledge, which would have stayed buried in their timidity if the occasion had not arisen. Tight corners are trials of reputation, and a noble man who sees his honour at stake does the work of a thousand. Queen Isabella the Catholic knew this lesson of putting men to it supremely well, as she knew all the rest; and to this political favour the Great Captain owed his renown, and many others their eternal fame: she made great men by this subtlety.

266. Don't Be Bad from Sheer Goodness

That is what the man is who never gets angry: there is little of the person in the unfeeling. It does not always come from indolence, but from incapacity. A show of feeling at the right moment is the act of a person. The birds soon learn to mock the scarecrow. To alternate the sour with the sweet is a proof of good taste: sweetness alone is for children and fools. It is a great ill to lose yourself from sheer goodness, in this sense of being past feeling.

267. Silken Words and a Gentle Nature

Arrows pierce the body, but harsh words pierce the soul. A good lozenge sweetens the breath. It is a great subtlety in living to know how to sell air. Most things are paid for in words, and words alone are enough to redeem a debt that could never be paid. Business is done in air, with air, and a sovereign's breath puts breath into men. Always keep your mouth full of sugar to candy your words, so that even your enemies find them sweet. The one way to be loved is to be pleasant.

268. The Sensible Man Does First What the Fool Does Last

Both do the same thing; they differ only in the timing: the one in season, the other out of it. The man who began by putting his understanding on the wrong foot goes on that way in all the rest: he carries underfoot what he should have set on his head, he turns his right hand into his left, and so he is gauche in everything he does. There is only one good time to see the point. They do under compulsion what they could have done of their own free will; but the discerning man sees at once what has to be done sooner or later, and does it gladly and to his credit.

269. Make Use of Your Novelty

As long as you are new, you will be esteemed. Novelty pleases everyone, for the variety; taste is refreshed, and a brand-new mediocrity is esteemed above an excellence everyone is used to. Eminences wear thin with handling and come to grow old; and bear in mind that this glory of novelty will last only a little while: in four days they will lose their respect for you. Know how to make use, then, of these first fruits of esteem, and in the brief flight of pleasing take everything you could hope for; for once the warmth of the recent has gone, passion will cool, and the delight of the new will turn into the tedium of the usual; and believe that everything has had its turn too, and that the turn has passed.

270. Don't Be Alone in Condemning What Pleases Many

There must be something good in it, since it satisfies so many; and though it cannot be explained, it is enjoyed. Singularity is always hateful, and when it is mistaken, ridiculous; it will discredit your poor opinion before it discredits the thing, and you will be left alone with your bad taste. If you cannot hit on what is good in it, hide your shortcoming and do not condemn wholesale, for bad taste is ordinarily born of ignorance. What everyone says either is so, or is on its way to being so.

271. If You Know Little, Always Keep to the Safest Course

This holds in every profession: they may not take you for subtle, but they will take you for sound. The man who knows can venture and act on his fancy; but to know little and take risks is jumping off a cliff of your own accord. Always keep to the right hand, for what is well established cannot fail. For little knowledge, the king's highway; and by every law, of knowing as of not knowing, safety is wiser than singularity.

272. Sell Things at the Price of Courtesy

That way you oblige people most. Nothing the grasping man can ask will ever come up to what the generous man gives when he is obliged. Courtesy does not give; it binds, and gallantry is the greatest obligation of all. Nothing costs an honourable man dearer than what is given him: it is selling it twice over, at two prices, one for its value and one for the courtesy. It is true that to the base man gallantry is gibberish, for he does not understand the terms of being on good terms.

273. Understanding the Temperaments of the People You Deal With

It is how you come to know their intentions. Know the cause well and you know the effect, first in the cause and afterwards in its motive. The melancholy man always forecasts misfortunes, and the slanderer faults: the worst is all that occurs to them, and since they cannot see the good that is present, they announce the ill that is possible. The man in a passion always speaks a language different from what things are; it is passion that speaks in him, not reason. And so each speaks according to his feeling or his humour, and all of them very far from the truth. Learn to decipher a face and spell out the soul in its signs. Know the man who always laughs for half-witted, and the man who never laughs for two-faced. Be wary of the questioner, either as a blabber or as a spy. Expect little good from the ill-favoured, for they tend to take their revenge on nature: as she did them little honour, they do her little. The greater the beauty, as a rule, the greater the folly.

274. Have the Power to Attract

It is a spell of politic courtesy. Use the gallant hook to draw affections rather than advantages, or both. Merit is not enough unless it calls on charm, which is what makes a man admired and is the most practical instrument of sovereignty. To catch on is luck, but it can be helped along by art, for the artificial sits best where there is a great natural gift. From this springs a kindly fondness, until it wins universal favour.

275. Easygoing, but Not Unseemly

Do not be forever on your dignity and out of humour; unbending is a branch of gallantry. You must yield something of your decorum to win the general affection. Now and then you may go where most people go, but without unseemliness, for the man who is taken for a fool in public will not be taken for a sensible man in private. More is lost in one day of high spirits than was won in all your seriousness. But you must not always be the exception, either: to be singular is to condemn the others. Still less put on finicky airs; leave them to their own sex: even the pious kind are ridiculous. The best thing in a man is to look like one, for a woman can affect the manly to perfection, but not the other way round.

276. Know How to Renew Your Temperament by Nature and by Art

They say a man's character changes every seven years: let it change to improve and heighten your taste. In the first seven, reason comes in; after that, let a new perfection come in with every five years. Watch this natural variation so as to help it along, and expect improvement in others too. That is why many men have changed their bearing with their station, or with their post; and sometimes how great the change was goes unnoticed until it is seen. At twenty a man will be a peacock; at thirty, a lion; at forty, a camel; at fifty, a serpent; at sixty, a dog; at seventy, an ape; and at eighty, nothing.

277. A Man of Display

Display is what makes gifts shine. There is a time for each: seize it, for not every day will be its day of triumph. There are dashing people in whom a little shines a great deal, and a great deal shines to the point of wonder. When the gift of display goes with eminence, it passes for a prodigy. There are nations given to display, and the Spanish more than any. Light was the first thing to make all creation shine. Display fills out much, makes up for much and gives everything a second being, all the more when there is reality to back it. Heaven, which gives perfection, provides for its display, for either alone would be forced. There must be art in display: even what is most excellent depends on circumstances and does not always have its moment. Display has gone wrong whenever it was out of season. No lustre asks less to be affected, and it always perishes of that clumsiness, for it stands at the very edge of vanity, and vanity at the edge of contempt. It must be very moderate so as not to become common, and with sensible people its excess has rather a bad name. Sometimes it lies rather in a mute eloquence, in showing perfection as if by carelessness; for wise concealment is the most admired boast, since that very withholding pricks curiosity to the quick. It is a great skill of display not to reveal all your perfection at once, but to let it show bit by bit, as a card player eases his cards apart, always adding more, so that one lustre is the pledge of a greater, and the applause for the first a new expectation of the rest.

278. Avoid Being Conspicuous in Anything

Once you are conspicuous, even your gifts become defects. This comes from singularity, which was always censured; the singular man is left alone. Even what is pretty, if it stands out, is a discredit; by making people stare it offends, and singularities without any standing much more so. Yet some want to be known even for their vices, seeking novelty in baseness so as to win such infamous fame. Even in intelligence, excess degenerates into pert chatter.

279. Don't Gainsay the Gainsayer

You must tell whether the contradiction comes from cunning or from commonness. It is not always stubbornness; sometimes it is artifice. Take care, then, not to get entangled in the one, nor go over the edge in the other. Care is never better spent than on spies, and against the picklock of minds there is no better counter-trick than to leave the key of reserve on the inside.

280. A Man of Good Faith

Good conduct is finished, obligations are given the lie, and there are few good returns: for the best service, the worst reward, as is now the custom all over the world. There are whole nations inclined to ill dealing: from some you must always fear treachery; from others, inconstancy; and from others, deceit. Let other people's bad faith serve you, then, not as a model but as a caution. The danger is that integrity comes off its hinges at the sight of base conduct. But the man of good faith never forgets what he is because of what others are.

281. The Favour of People of Understanding

The lukewarm yes of one exceptional man is worth more than all the applause of the crowd, for belching chaff is no nourishment. The wise speak with their understanding, and so their praise gives an undying satisfaction. The judicious Antigonus, king of Macedon, reduced the whole theatre of his fame to Zeno the Stoic alone, and Plato called Aristotle his whole school. Some care only about filling their stomachs, even with the common rubbish. Even sovereigns need those who write, and should fear their pens more than ugly women fear the painter's brush.

282. Make Use of Absence

Use it to win respect, or to win esteem. If presence lessens fame, absence increases it. The man who was taken for a lion while absent was, once present, the ridiculous mouse of the mountains in labour. Gifts lose their lustre if they are rubbed, for the bark of the outside is seen before the great substance of the mind. Imagination outruns sight, and the illusion that usually comes in by the ear ends by going out through the eyes. Whoever keeps himself at the centre of his good name keeps his reputation; for even the phoenix makes use of retirement for its dignity, and of desire for its value.

283. A Man of Invention, but Sensibly

It argues an excess of wit; but what wit is there without its grain of madness? Invention belongs to men of wit; good choice, to the prudent. It is also a gift of grace, and a rarer one, for many have managed to choose well, but few to invent well, and those few the first in excellence and in time. Novelty flatters, and when it succeeds, it gives good things a double lustre. In matters of judgment it is dangerous, for its paradox; in matters of wit, praiseworthy; and when they hit the mark, both are admired.

284. Don't Meddle, and You Won't Be Snubbed

Esteem yourself, if you want others to esteem you. Be sparing of yourself rather than lavish. Arrive wanted, and you will be well received. Never come unless you are called, nor go unless you are sent. The man who takes a thing on himself brings all the hatred down on his own head if it goes badly, and if it goes well, he gets no thanks for it. The meddler is a butt for scorn, and precisely because he pushes his way in shamelessly, he is sent off in confusion.

285. Don't Go Down in Someone Else's Misfortune

Know the man who is stuck in the mud, and note that he will call out to you, to make a comfort of a shared ill. Such people look for someone to help them carry their misfortune, and those who turned their backs on you in prosperity now hold out their hand. Great care is needed with the drowning, to come to their help without danger.

286. Don't Let Yourself Be Wholly Obliged, nor Obliged to Everyone

That would make you a slave, and a public one. Some were born luckier than others, the one sort to do good and the other to receive it. Freedom is more precious than the gift you lose it for. Take more pleasure in having many depend on you than in depending on one. Command has no other advantage than being able to do more good. Above all, do not take for a favour the obligation you are getting into; most often it will be another man's cunning that arranged it, to get in ahead of you.

287. Never Act in a Passion

If you do, you will get everything wrong. A man who is beside himself should not act by himself, and passion always banishes reason. Put a prudent third party in your place, who will be prudent if he is free of passion: the onlookers always see more than the players, because they are not carried away. As soon as you see you are roused, let good sense sound the retreat before your blood is fully up, for whatever you do then you will do in blood, and in a short while you will make matter for many days of confusion for yourself and gossip for others.

288. Live as the Occasion Demands

Governing, reasoning, everything must suit the case. Will when you can, for season and time wait for no one. Do not live by generalities, unless it be in favour of virtue, and do not lay down strict laws to your will, for tomorrow you will have to drink the water you scorn today. Some people are so paradoxically impertinent that they expect all the circumstances of success to fit their mania, and not the other way round. But the wise man knows that the polestar of prudence is to bear yourself as the occasion requires.

289. A Man's Greatest Discredit Is to Show That He Is a Man

They stop thinking him divine the day they see him very human. Levity is the greatest enemy of reputation. Just as the reserved man is held to be more than a man, the light one is held to be less. No vice does more to lower a man's authority, because levity stands face to face against gravity. A light man cannot be a man of substance, all the more if he is old, when his age obliges him to good sense. And though this discredit is shared by so many, that does not stop it being singularly disgraceful.

290. It Is Good Fortune to Combine Esteem with Affection

Do not be too much loved, if you would keep respect. Love is bolder than hatred; fondness and veneration do not go well together; and though you should not be much feared, neither should you be much loved. Love brings in familiarity, and as fast as familiarity comes in, esteem goes out. Be loved with esteem rather than with affection, for that is the love that suits real persons.

291. Know How to Probe

Let the attention of the judicious man match the retention of the reserved: it takes great judgment to measure another man's. It matters more to know the temperaments and properties of people than those of herbs and stones. This is one of the subtlest things in life: metals are known by their ring, and people by their speech. Words show integrity, but deeds much more. Here you need uncommon care, deep observation, subtle notice and a judicious verdict.

292. Let Your Nature Outdo the Demands of Your Post, and Not the Reverse

However great the post, you must show that the person is greater. A capacity with room to spare keeps expanding and showing more with each post it holds. The man with a narrow heart is soon cornered, and in the end he goes bankrupt in both obligation and reputation. The great Augustus prided himself on being more a man than a prince. Here greatness of soul counts, and even a sensible confidence in yourself helps.

293. On Maturity

It shines in a man's outward bearing, but more in his ways. Physical weight makes gold precious, and moral weight a person. Maturity is the dignity of your gifts, and inspires veneration. A man's composure is the façade of his soul. It is not the folly that barely stirs, as levity would have it, but a very quiet authority. It speaks in maxims and acts with success. It presupposes a man well formed, for he has as much of the person in him as he has of maturity. Once he stops being a child, a man begins to be grave and to carry authority.

294. Be Moderate in Your Opinions

Everyone forms his idea of a thing according to his interest, and has reasons in abundance for his view. In most people judgment gives way to feeling. It happens that two people meet holding contrary views and each presumes reason is on his side; but reason, being faithful, never knew how to show two faces. Let the wise man proceed with wariness on so delicate a point, and so his doubt of himself will revise his verdict on the other's conduct. Put yourself sometimes on the other side; examine the other man's motives from where he stands. In this way you will neither condemn him nor justify yourself so blindly.

295. No Boaster of Deeds, but a Doer of Them

The less they have to do, the busier they look. They make a mystery of everything, with the greatest frigidity: chameleons of applause, giving everyone a bellyful of laughter. Vanity was always tiresome; here it is laughed at: these little ants of honour go begging for exploits. Make less show of your greatest eminences. Be content to do, and leave the telling to others. Give your deeds away; do not sell them. Nor should you hire golden pens to write mud, to the disgust of good sense. Aspire to be heroic rather than only to seem it.⁵

296. A Man of Gifts, and Majestic Ones

First-rate gifts make first-rate men. A single one is worth a whole middling multitude. There was a man who liked everything of his to be great, even his household goods. How much more should the great man see to it that the gifts of his soul are great! In God everything is infinite, everything immense; so in a hero everything must be great and majestic, so that all his actions, and even his words, go clothed in a transcendent, grand majesty.

297. Always Act as if You Were Watched

He is a circumspect man who sees that he is seen, or will be. He knows that walls have ears and that a bad deed is bursting to get out. Even when alone he acts as if in sight of the whole world, for he knows that everything will be known; he already looks on those who will be witnesses later, by hearsay, as witnesses now. The man who wanted the whole world to see him did not mind that his neighbours could look into his house from theirs.

298. Three Things Make a Prodigy

They are the greatest gift of the most generous bounty: a wit that is fruitful, a judgment that is insightful, and a taste that is supremely delightful. It is a great advantage to conceive well, and a greater one to reason well: that is what makes an understanding good. Wit must not sit in the backbone, or it would be laborious rather than sharp. Thinking well is the fruit of rationality. At twenty the will reigns, at thirty wit, at forty judgment. There are minds that give off a light of their own, like the eyes of the lynx, and reason best in the deepest dark; and there are minds of the moment, which always hit on what is most to the purpose. Much comes to them, and good: a most happy fertility. But good taste seasons the whole of life.

299. Leave Them Hungry

Take even nectar away while it is still at their lips. Desire is the measure of esteem; even with bodily thirst it is a trick of good taste to whet it and not to quench it. Good things, if few, are twice as good. The second time is a great comedown: surfeits of pleasure are dangerous, for they bring contempt on the most eternal eminence. The one rule for pleasing: leave the appetite while it is still sharp with hunger. If you must provoke it, let it be by the impatience of desire rather than by the weariness of enjoyment: a happiness that has been longed for is enjoyed twice over.

300. In a Word, Be a Saint

That says it all at once. Virtue is the chain of all perfections, the centre of all happiness. It makes a man prudent, watchful, shrewd, sensible, wise, brave, self-possessed, upright, happy, admired, truthful and a hero in every part. Three S's make a man happy: saintly, sound and sage. Virtue is the sun of the little world of man, and its hemisphere is a good conscience; it is so beautiful that it wins the grace of God and the favour of men. Nothing is lovable but virtue, and nothing hateful but vice. Virtue alone is in earnest; all the rest is a joke. Capacity and greatness are to be measured by virtue, not by fortune. Virtue alone is enough for itself. In life it makes a man lovable; in death, memorable.