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I neither like it nor think well of it, even though the world, by common consent, has decided to honour it with special favour. Wisdom is decked out in it; so are Virtue and Conscience – a daft and monstrous adornment. More reasonably it is not sadness but wickedness that the Italians have baptised tristezza,1 for it is a quality which is ever harmful, ever mad.
Cambises asked him why he had remained unmoved by the fate of his son and daughter yet showed such emotion at the death of his friend. ‘Only the last of these misfortunes can be expressed by tears’, he replied; ‘the first two are way beyond any means of expression.’
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We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be – even when we ourselves shall be no more.
dolus an virtus quis in hoste requirat? [Trickery or valour: what does it matter between enemies?]1
We are less scrupulous: we hold that the honour of a war goes to him who wins by it, and following Lysander we say that when the lion’s skin does not suffice we must sew on a patch from the fox’s.5
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I readily trust others: but I would only do so with difficulty if ever I were to give grounds for thinking that I was acting out of despair or from lack of courage rather than from frankness and trust in a man’s word.
that is a remarkable example of the mad curiosity of our nature which wastes time trying to seize hold of the future as though it were not enough to have to deal with the present:
men are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them.
being rich does not alleviate our worries: it changes them.54 And truly it is not want that produces avarice but plenty.
always to bring those with whom I am talking back to the subjects they know best.
For the reverse usually happens, everyone choosing to orate about another’s job rather than his own, reckoning to increase his reputation by so doing;
Under some pretext or other we are always ready to withdraw our obedience and to usurp the mastery.
‘what use is knowledge if there is no understanding?’
Let him not so much learn what happened as judge what happened. [C] That, if you ask me, is the subject to which our wits are applied in the most diverse of manners.
That is what Menander replied when the day came for his promised comedy and people chided him for not yet putting it in hand: ‘It is already composed,’ he said. ‘All I have to do is to put it into verse.’86 Having thought the things through and arranged them in his mind, he attached little importance to the remainder.
On the other hand there is a silly arrogance in continuing to disdain something and to condemn it as false just because it seems unlikely to us.
It is not that experience has subsequently shown me anything going beyond my original beliefs (nor is it from any lack of curiosity on my part), but reason has taught me that, if you condemn in this way anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible, you are claiming to know the frontiers and bounds of the will of God and the power of Nature our Mother; it taught me also that there is nothing in the whole world madder than bringing matters down to the measure of our own capacities and potentialities.
We should be similarly wary of accepting common opinions; we should judge them by the ways of reason not by popular vote.
A man may well have detailed knowledge or experience of the nature of one particular river or stream, yet about all the others he knows only what everyone else does; but in order to trot out his little scrap of knowledge he will write a book on the whole of physics!
The evil methods which men use to get ahead in our century clearly show that their aims cannot be worth much.
Now the end I think is always the same: how to live in leisure at our ease.
Whenever our soul finds something to do she is there in her entirety: domestic tasks may be less important but they are no less importunate.
As for your learned intelligence, do not worry about that: it will not lose its effect if you yourself are improved by it. Remember the man who was asked why he toiled so hard at an art which few could ever know about: “For me a few are enough; one is enough; having none is enough.”
[That man is inwardly blessed; the other’s happiness is merely gold-plated]:
Our own specific property is to be equally laughable and able to laugh.
Ariston wisely defined rhetoric as the art of persuading the people; Socrates and Plato, as the art of deceiving and flattering;
When people fail to understand everything they read is it only the fault of the words!
Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest! [It’s a bad resolution which can never be changed!]
even sound authors are wrong in stubbornly trying to weave us into one invariable and solid fabric.
Quod petiit, spernit, repetit quod nuper omisit; Æstuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto. [Judgement scorns what it yearned for, yearns again for what it recently spurned; it shifts like the tide and the whole of life is disordered.]
Moreover the opinion which holds our life in contempt is a ridiculous one. For, in the end, life is our being and our all. Creatures who enjoy a being richer and nobler than we do may well criticize ours, but it is unnatural that we should despise ourselves or care little for ourselves; it is a sickness peculiar to Man to hate and despise himself; it is found in no other animate creature.
No marvel2 then if Virtue desires and accepts that sort of common currency less willingly than the one which is proper and peculiar to herself.
Watching animals playing together and cuddling each other is nobody’s sport: everyone’s sport is to watch them tearing each other apart and wrenching off their limbs.
Truly, learning is a most useful accomplishment and a great one. Those who despise it give ample proof of their animal-stupidity.
[That which once was feared too greatly is now avidly trampled underfoot.]
When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?
The lawless flood of our greed outstrips everything we invent to try and slake it.
[If you boast in words you should not surrender in fact].
The wisest man that ever was, when asked what he knew, replied that the one thing he did know was that he knew nothing.152
They say that the largest bit of what we do know is smaller than the tiniest bit of what we do not know; he showed that to be true.
In other words, the very things we think we know form part of our ignorance, and a small part at that. [C] We know things in a dream, says Plato; ...
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What an outrageous sword [C] the mind is, even for its owner, [A] unless he knows how to arm himself ordinately and with discretion.
in short there is nothing so extreme that it has not been admitted by the custom of some nation or other.
This happens because we set too much store by ourselves. It appears to us that the whole universe in some way suffers when we are obliterated and that it feels compassion for our predicament, especially since our perception has been affected and sees things accordingly: as our vision fails we think that it is they which are failing: just as for those travelling by sea the mountains, fields, cities, sky and land all go by at the same speed as they do:1 [B]
None of us gives enough thought to his being only one.
To adjudicate an acre of land we have to select a dozen men out of an entire nation: yet when it comes to adjudicating our propensities and our actions – the most difficult and most important matter of all – we have recourse to the votes of the common people and of the mob, that mother of ignorance, of injustice and of inconstancy. [C] Is it reasonable to make the life of a man, or depend on the judgement of idiots? ‘An quidquam stultius quam quos singulos contemnas, eos aliquid putare esse universos?’ [Can anything be more stupid than to value collectively those whom we despise as
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[Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.]
[truly nothing is more self-assured than a bad poet.]
As for that novel virtue of deceit and dissimulation that is now much honoured I hate it unto death, and among all the vices I can find none which bears better testimony to cowardice and to baseness of mind. It is an abject and a slave-like humour to go disguising and hiding yourself behind a mask and not to dare to let yourself be seen as you are. That way, men of our time are trained for perfidy: [B] being used to utter words of falsehood, to break their word they do not scruple. [A] A noble mind must not belie its thoughts: it wants its inward parts to be seen: [C] everything there is good
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I do not know what princes expect to get out of constantly pretending and lying, except not to be believed even when they do tell the truth. It may deceive people once or twice; but to profess your dissimulation and to boast as some of our princes have done that they would toss their very shirt on to the fire if it knew of their real intentions (which is a saying of an Ancient, Metellus of Macedon); to declare that a man who knows not how to feign knows not how to reign is to forewarn those who have to deal with them that what they say is all cheating and lies.
