Don’t waste time and mental energy in comparing yourself to others, whether to your shame or gratification, since we are all wayfarers. Come to what you read with a charitable disposition: don’t expect to fight with the text, but instead seek to treat it well; be willing to meet it more than halfway, as though it were a guest in your home, which in a way it is. (In some rare cases you might think of the book as the host, yourself as the guest: Machiavelli’s habitual posture suggests that he thought of entering his own library as though he were entering a great king’s court.) Above all, take
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