Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims Part 17

435.--Luck and temper rule the world.

436.--It is far easier to know men than to know man.

437.--We should not judge of a man's merit by his great abilities, but by the use he makes of them.

438.--There is a certain lively grat.i.tude which not only releases us from benefits received, but which also, by making a return to our friends as payment, renders them indebted to us.

["And understood not that a grateful mind, By owing owes not, but is at once Indebted and discharged." Milton. Paradise Lost.]

439.--We should earnestly desire but few things if we clearly knew what we desired.

440.--The cause why the majority of women are so little given to friendship is, that it is insipid after having felt love.

["Those who have experienced a great pa.s.sion neglect friendship, and those who have united themselves to friendship have nought to do with love."--La Bruyere. Du Coeur.]

441.--As in friendship so in love, we are often happier from ignorance than from knowledge.

442.--We try to make a virtue of vices we are loth to correct.

443.--The most violent pa.s.sions give some respite, but vanity always disturbs us.

444.--Old fools are more foolish than young fools.

["Malvolio. Infirmity{,} that decays the wise{,} doth eve{r} make the better fool. Clown. G.o.d send you, sir, a speedy infirmity{,} for the better increasing of your folly."--Shakespeare. Twelfth Night{, Act I, Scene V}.]

445.--Weakness is more hostile to virtue than vice.

446.--What makes the grief of shame and jealousy so acute is that vanity cannot aid us in enduring them.

447.--Propriety is the least of all laws, but the most obeyed.

[Honour has its supreme laws, to which education is bound to conform....Those things which honour forbids are more rigorously forbidden when the laws do not concur in the prohibition, and those it commands are more strongly insisted upon when they happen not to be commanded by law.--Montesquieu, {The Spirit Of Laws, }b. 4, c. ii.]

448.--A well-trained mind has less difficulty in submitting to than in guiding an ill-trained mind.

449.--When fortune surprises us by giving us some great office without having gradually led us to expect it, or without having raised our hopes, it is well nigh impossible to occupy it well, and to appear worthy to fill it.

450.--Our pride is often increased by what we retrench from our other faults.

["The loss of sensual pleasures was supplied and compensated by spiritual pride."--Gibbon. Decline And Fall, chap. xv.]

451.--No fools so wearisome as those who have some wit.

452.--No one believes that in every respect he is behind the man he considers the ablest in the world.

453.--In great matters we should not try so much to create opportunities as to utilise those that offer themselves.

[Yet Lord Bacon says "A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds."--Essays, {(1625), "Of Ceremonies and Respects"}]

454.--There are few occasions when we should make a bad bargain by giving up the good on condition that no ill was said of us.

455.--However disposed the world may be to judge wrongly, it far oftener favours false merit than does justice to true.

456.--Sometimes we meet a fool with wit, never one with discretion.

457.--We should gain more by letting the world see what we are than by trying to seem what we are not.

458.--Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves.

459.--There are many remedies to cure love, yet none are infallible.

460.--It would be well for us if we knew all our pa.s.sions make us do.

461.--Age is a tyrant who forbids at the penalty of life all the pleasures of youth.

462.--The same pride which makes us blame faults from which we believe ourselves free causes us to despise the good qualities we have not.

463.--There is often more pride than goodness in our grief for our enemies' miseries; it is to show how superior we are to them, that we bestow on them the sign of our compa.s.sion.

464.--There exists an excess of good and evil which surpa.s.ses our comprehension.