Chapter I: CANNOT conceive of a wisdom that lacks distrust: according to the

Scriptures the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God--I believe it is rather the fear of men.

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WE must needs have the power of uniting contrarieties: love of virtue with indifference to public opinion, taste for work with indifference to glory, attention to health with indifference to life.

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THERE are few vices that prevent a man from having many friends so much as his too high qualities prevent him.

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VANITY is often the motive that forces a man to summon up all the energy of his soul. Wood added to a steel point makes a dart, two feathers added to the wood make an arrow.

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A MAN of no principles is also, as a rule, a man of no character, for had he been born with character, he would have felt the need of forming principles.

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NEARLY all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians--lack of power to pronounce the syllable, No. To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only two means to preserve one’s freedom and one’s character.

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WHAT I have learnt I no longer know; what I still know has come to me by intuition.

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MAN can aspire to virtue; he cannot reasonably aim at finding truth.

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MAN reaches each stage in his life as a novice.

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THE majority of human beings in the world pass their lives in it so heedlessly and think so little, that they do not know that world which they have before their eyes every day. They do not, M. de B. wittily remarked, for the same reason that cockchafers have no acquaintance with natural history.

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’TIS not generally known how much wit a man requires to avoid being ridiculous.

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“ARE you not ashamed to wish to speak better than you can?” said Seneca to one of his sons who could not work out the exordium of an oration he was composing. One might say the same to those who adopt principles stronger than their character will bear. “Are you not ashamed of wishing to be more of a philosopher than you can be?”

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IN great actions men show themselves as they ought to be, in small actions as they are.

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VAIN is equivalent to empty; thus vanity is so miserable a thing, that one cannot give it a worse name than its own. It proclaims itself for what it is.

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HE is far advanced in the study of morals who can lay his finger on all the points that distinguish pride from vanity. The first is lofty, calm, dignified, imperturbable, resolute; the second mean, inconstant, easily swayed, restless, unsteady. One raises a man, the other puffs him up. The first is source of a thousand virtues, the second that of nearly all vices and all caprices. There is a kind of pride in which are comprised all the commandments of God, a kind of vanity that embodies the seven deadly sins.

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CELEBRITY: the advantage of being known to those who do not know you.

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THE love of glory a virtue! A strange virtue truly, that calls to its aid the co-operation of all the vices, that finds stimulants in ambition, envy, vanity, sometimes even avarice! Would Titus have been Titus had he had as his ministers Sejanus, Narcissus, and Tigellinus?

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IN order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. ’Tis a necessary evil.

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THOUGHT consoles us for all, and heals all. If at times it does you ill, ask it for the remedy for that ill and it will give it you.

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THAT to feel makes one think is pretty generally admitted; that to think makes one feel finds less acceptance, but is almost as true.

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THE intelligence is often to the heart what the library of a mansion is to the person of its master.

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A BAD man will occasionally do a good action. One might say that he wishes to see whether it gives as much pleasure as honest folk assert.

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STUPIDITY would not be absolute stupidity did it not fear intelligence. Vice would not be absolute vice did it not hate virtue.

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ONE suspects the idleness of a knave and the silence of a fool.

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GENEROSITY is the pitifulness of noble hearts.

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ALL passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions.

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“THE manner in which I see you distributing praise and blame,” said M. de B---- to a friend, “would make the best man in the world anxious to be defamed.”

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FALSE modesty is the most decent of all deceptions.

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THERE are certain failings that preserve one from some epidemic vices, just as it may be noted that in time of plague fever-stricken patients escape contagion.

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THE philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out.

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ONE of the great misfortunes of man is that even his good qualities are sometimes useless to him, and that the art of profiting by them and governing them wisely is often the tardy fruit of experience alone.

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NATURE in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

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HOPE is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it. I would fain inscribe upon the gate of Paradise the line that Dante wrote upon that of Hell--“Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.”

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OUR reason sometimes makes us as unhappy as our passions, and in such a case one can say of a man that he is a patient poisoned by his physician.

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IT is nature’s will that wise men have their illusions as well as fools, to the end that they be not made too unhappy by their own wisdom.

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THAT tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Bible is a fine allegory. Is it not intended to signify that when one has penetrated to the depths of things, the consequent loss of illusions brings about the death of the soul--that is to say a complete detachment from all that moves and interests other men?

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THE physical world appears the work of a good and mighty Being who has had to abandon the execution of part of his plan to a maleficent Being. But the moral world seems rather the production of a crazy fiend’s caprices.

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WHEN I hear it argued that, taking everything into account, the least sensitive folk are the happiest, I remember the Indian proverb: “Better to be seated than standing, better to be lying than seated, but better than all else to be dead.”

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LIVING is a disease from the pains of which sleep eases us every sixteen hours; sleep is but a palliative, death alone is the cure.

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TIME diminishes for us the intensity of _absolute_ pleasures, to use the metaphysician’s term, but apparently it increases _relative_ pleasures; and I suspect that this is the artifice by which nature is able to attach men to life after the loss of the objects or pleasures which most rendered it agreeable.

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SOME ONE described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence.

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M. ---- said to me, _à propos_ of his constant offences against digestion, and of the pleasures in which he indulged--the only obstacles to his regaining his health: “I should be marvellously well if it were not for myself.”

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NATURE seems to make use of men for the accomplishment of her designs without concerning herself about her instruments, like tyrants who rid themselves of those who have been of service to them.

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THERE is no need to regard Burrhus as an absolutely virtuous man; he is only so, contrasted with Narcissus. Seneca and Burrhus are the honest men of an age in which there are none.

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IN order to sum up in a single word the rarity of honest folk, a friend remarked to me that in society the honest man is a variety of the human species.

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I USED to know a misanthrope who in his good-humoured moments would say: “I should not be at all surprised if there were an honest man hidden away in some corner without any one knowing of him.”

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THE thrifty man is the richest, the miser the poorest of men.

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AN empty headed fellow who has a passing flash of wit astonishes and scandalises one as does a cab horse at a gallop.

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