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The wise moderate anger and resentment by understanding the causes of others’ actions.
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Books teach us without rods or stripes, unlike the lessons taught by impatient schoolmasters; without taunts or anger, without gifts or money. Books are not asleep when we approach them, nor do they deny us when we question them, or chide us when we err, or laugh at our ignorance.
No one is ever ashamed of turning to a book. We might blush to admit ignorance to a fellow human, but never to a dictionary. Books are the golden pots of manna, which feed out hunger.
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The desire of glory has great power in washing the tinctures of philosophy out of the minds of men.
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Even though we are always living in the expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be endured while it lasts.
Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have not been living, but merely waiting to live;
They will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and allowed to pass them by unenjoyed, was the life they were expecting.
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Wisdom and the freedom it brings must daily be won anew.
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- An open box tempts an honest person.
- It is easy to keep a castle that was never assaulted.
- The less the temptation, the greater the crime.
- Who is worse, tempter or tempted?
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Wide and justifiable breaches are caused by an immoral request made by one friend of another, to pander to someone’s desire to assist him in doing wrong. A refusal, though perfectly right, is attacked by the asker as a violation of the laws of friendship.
The people who have no scruples about the requests they make to their friends, thereby allow that they are ready to have no scruples about what they will do for their friends; and it is the recriminations of such people which commonly not only quench friendships, but give rise to lasting enmities.
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Have you grown a stranger to peace?
Are you troubled? Take the flagon and a cup;
Leave the turmoil of the town, its dust and clamour,
Walk up those paths that wind into the woods,
And let the sunlight paint patterns through the leaves around you,
The chorus of birds sing to you,
The stream falling among the rocks soothe you.In the brevity of life there is little time for these self-estrangements.
Go up to the woods;
You will find yourself waiting there,
Flagon and cup ready, peace seated beside you. -
The marks of the wise are, that they censure no one, praise where it is due, blame no one, accuse no one, say nothing concerning themselves as being anybody, or knowing anything:
When they are, in any instance, hindered or limited, they blame only themselves; if they are praised, they take it with modesty and proportion; if censured, they make no defence.
But they go about with the caution of sick or injured people, careful not to move anything that is right, intent on putting right what is wrong.
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Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and those who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.
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We learn, if we are brave, the power of mind, which is the greatest thing in man; of how, though man is small before nature, his mind can encompass all nature, in thinking of it, and singing about it, searching it in science, and celebrating it in poetry.
So I think all the sages found both courage and modesty through the mind’s contact with nature, and these two things are the begetters of hope.
Is there proof that they were right to hope? Well, only consider: it is many centuries since the first sages paced their groves, and their words and thoughts are with us today, and we speak of them;
Though nature conquered their bodies and their bodies are dispersed into the elements once more, the fruit of their minds is with us still.
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Take nature and human fellow-feeling as the true guides to an honourable and well-lived life.
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No one belonged to himself, but to the state only, without personal freedom;
Sparta was preserved in its institutions and manners by a strict limitation of knowledge and an impoverished austerity; to make the whole society an army is as much to make it a tribe of ants merely; the arts of civilisation and philosophy were excluded for what elsewhere they were valued, namely their promise of innovation and the expansion both of knowledge and the human character.
In short, though Sparta had the camaraderie and discipline of the military camp, it had little else.
And such might even be said in balance with the well-ordering of the state, the health of its citizens, the sensible liberality of its morals and its safety from conquest and enslavement by foreigners.
How might a state combine these benefits without the imitations and severity that made Sparta a place, in effect, of self imposed siege?
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- Advice is what the wise do not need and fools do not take.
- Who will not be advised cannot be helped.
- When well, we easily advise the sick.
- Whispered advice is not worth a pea.
Enlightening snippets from The Good Book: A Secular Bible by A.C. Grayling.
- Genesis
- Wisdom
- Parables
- Concord
- Lamentations
- Consolations
- Sages
- Songs
- Histories
- Proverbs
- The Lawgiver
- Acts
- Epistles
- The Good
