Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims Part 4

61.--The happiness or unhappiness of men depends no less upon their dispositions than their fortunes.

["Still to ourselves in every place consigned Our own felicity we make or find." Goldsmith, Traveller, 431.]

62.--Sincerity is an openness of heart; we find it in very few people; what we usually see is only an artful dissimulation to win the confidence of others.

63.--The aversion to lying is often a hidden ambition to render our words credible and weighty, and to attach a religious aspect to our conversation.

64.--Truth does not do as much good in the world, as its counterfeits do evil.

65.--There is no praise we have not lavished upon Prudence; and yet she cannot a.s.sure to us the most trifling event.

[The author corrected this maxim several times, in 1665 it is No.

75; 1666, No. 66; 1671-5, No. 65; in the last edition it stands as at present. In the first he quotes Juvenal, Sat. X., line 315. " Nullum numen habes si sit Prudentia, nos te; Nos facimus, Fortuna, deam, coeloque locamus." Applying to Prudence what Juvenal does to Fortune, and with much greater force.]

66.--A clever man ought to so regulate his interests that each will fall in due order. Our greediness so often troubles us, making us run after so many things at the same time, that while we too eagerly look after the least we miss the greatest.

67.--What grace is to the body good sense is to the mind.

68.--It is difficult to define love; all we can say is, that in the soul it is a desire to rule, in the mind it is a sympathy, and in the body it is a hidden and delicate wish to possess what we love--Plus many mysteries.

["Love is the love of one {singularly,} with desire to be singularly beloved."--Hobbes{Leviathan, (1651), Part I, Chapter VI}.]

{Two notes about this quotation: (1) the translators' mistakenly have "singularity" for the first "singularly" and (2) Hobbes does not actually write "Love is the..."--he writes "Love of one..." under the heading "The pa.s.sion of Love."}

69.--If there is a pure love, exempt from the mixture of our other pa.s.sions, it is that which is concealed at the bottom of the heart and of which even ourselves are ignorant.

70.--There is no disguise which can long hide love where it exists, nor feign it where it does not.

71.--There are few people who would not be ashamed of being beloved when they love no longer.

72.--If we judge of love by the majority of its results it rather resembles hatred than friendship.

73.--We may find women who have never indulged in an intrigue, but it is rare to find those who have intrigued but once.

["Yet there are some, they say, who have had None}; But those who have, ne'er end with only one}." {--Lord Byron, }Don Juan, {Canto} iii., stanza 4.]

74.--There is only one sort of love, but there are a thousand different copies.

75.--Neither love nor fire can subsist without perpetual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope, or to fear.

[So Lord Byron{Stanzas, (1819), stanza 3} says of Love-- "Like chiefs of faction, His life is action."]

76.--There is real love just as there are real ghosts; every person speaks of it, few persons have seen it.

["Oh Love! no habitant of earth thou art-- An unseen seraph, we believe in thee-- A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart,-- But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see The naked eye, thy form as it should be."

{--Lord Byron, }Childe Harold, {Canto} iv., stanza 121.]

77.--Love lends its name to an infinite number of engagements (Commerces) which are attributed to it, but with which it has no more concern than the Doge has with all that is done in Venice.

78.--The love of justice is simply in the majority of men the fear of suffering injustice.

79.--Silence is the best resolve for him who distrusts himself.

80.--What renders us so changeable in our friendship is, that it is difficult to know the qualities of the soul, but easy to know those of the mind.

81.--We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect.

82.--Reconciliation with our enemies is but a desire to better our condition, a weariness of war, the fear of some unlucky accident.

["Thus terminated that famous war of the Fronde. The Duke de la Rochefoucauld desired peace because of his dangerous wounds and ruined castles, which had made him dread even worse events. On the other side the Queen, who had shown herself so ungrateful to her too ambitious friends, did not cease to feel the bitterness of their resentment. 'I wish,' said she, 'it were always night, because daylight shows me so many who have betrayed me.'"--Memoires De Madame De Motteville, Tom.

IV., p. 60. Another proof that although these maxims are in some cases of universal application, they were based entirely on the experience of the age in which the author lived.]

83.--What men term friendship is merely a partnership with a collection of reciprocal interests, and an exchange of favours--in fact it is but a trade in which self love always expects to gain something.

84.--It is more disgraceful to distrust than to be deceived by our friends.

85.--We often persuade ourselves to love people who are more powerful than we are, yet interest alone produces our friendship; we do not give our hearts away for the good we wish to do, but for that we expect to receive.

86.--Our distrust of another justifies his deceit.

87.--Men would not live long in society were they not the dupes of each other.

[A maxim, adds Aime Martin, "Which may enter into the code of a vulgar rogue, but one is astonished to find it in a moral treatise." Yet we have scriptural authority for it: "Deceiving and being deceived."--2 TIM. iii. 13.]