The Wisdom of Life

And so people who feel that they possess solid intellectual capacity and a sound judgment, and yet cannot claim the highest mental powers, should not be afraid of laborious study; for by its aid they may work themselves above the great mob of humanity who have the facts constantly before their eyes, and reach those secluded spots which are accessib

The two great dramatic poets of modern times have each taken man’s honor as the theme of two plays; Shakespeare in Othello and The Winter’s Tale, and Calderon in El medico de su honra, (The Physician of his Honor), and A secreto agravio secreta venganza, (for Secret Insult Secret Vengeance).

Goethe declares that if we had to depend for our life upon the favor of others, we should never have lived at all; from their desire to appear important themselves, people gladly ignore our very existence:

The dull person will like what is dull, and the common person what is common; a man whose ideas are mixed will be attracted by confusion of thought; and folly will appeal to him who has no brains at all; but best of all, a man will like his own works, as being of a character thoroughly at one with himself.

fame shuns those who seek it, and seeks those who shun it;

We should add very much to our happiness by a timely recognition of the simple truth that every man’s chief and real existence is in his own skin, and not in other people’s opinions; and, consequently, that the actual conditions of our personal life,–health, temperament, capacity, income, wife, children, friends, home, are a hundred times more impo

Besides, other people’s heads are a wretched place to be the home of a man’s true happiness–a fanciful happiness perhaps, but not a real one.

–what is worth doing is hard to do.

From a moral point of view, the right of the stronger is no more convincing than the right of the more skillful; and it is skill which is employed if you murder a a man treacherously.