Maxims and Reflections - LightNovelsOnl.com
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It is much easier to recognise error than to find truth; for error lies on the surface and may be overcome; but truth lies in the depths, and to search for it is not given to every one.
138
We all live on the past, and through the past are destroyed.
139
We are no sooner about to learn some great lesson than we take refuge in our own innate poverty of soul, and yet for all that the lesson has not been quite in vain.
140
The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill-will and envy.
141
Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
142
Confidences are strange things. If you listen only to one man, it is possible that he is deceived or mistaken; if you listen to many, they are in a like case; and, generally, you cannot get at the truth at all.
143
No one should desire to live in irregular circ.u.mstances; but if by chance a man falls into them, they test his character and show of how much determination he is capable.
144
An honourable man with limited ideas often sees through the rascality of the most cunning jobber.
145
If a man feels no love, he must learn how to flatter; otherwise he will not succeed.
146
Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then criticism will gradually yield to him.
147
The ma.s.ses cannot dispense with men of ability, and such men are always a burden to them.
148
If a man spreads my failings abroad, he is my master, even though he were my servant.
149
Whether memoirs are written by masters of servants, or by servants of masters, the processes always meet.
150
If you lay duties upon people and give them no rights, you must pay them well.
151
I can promise to be sincere, but not to be impartial.
152
Ingrat.i.tude is always a kind of weakness. I have never known men of ability to be ungrateful.
153
We are all so limited that we always think we are right; and so we may conceive of an extraordinary mind which not only errs but has a positive delight in error.
154
It is very rare to find pure and steady activity in the accomplishment of what is good and right. We usually see pedantry trying to keep back, and audacity trying to go on too fast.
155
Word and picture are correlatives which are continually in quest of each other, as is sufficiently evident in the case of metaphors and similes.
So from all time what was said or sung inwardly to the ear had to be presented equally to the eye. And so in childish days we see word and picture in continual balance; in the book of the law and in the way of salvation, in the Bible and in the spelling-book. When something was spoken which could not be pictured, and something pictured which could not be spoken, all went well; but mistakes were often made, and a word was used instead of a picture; and thence arose those monsters of symbolical mysticism, which are doubly an evil.
156
For the man of the world a collection of anecdotes and maxims is of the greatest value, if he knows how to intersperse the one in his conversation at fitting moments, and remember the other when a case arises for their application.
157
When you lose interest in anything, you also lose the memory for it.
158
The world is a bell with a crack in it; it rattles, but does not ring.
159
The importunity of young dilettanti must be borne with good-will; for as they grow old they become the truest wors.h.i.+ppers of Art and the Master.
160
People have to become really bad before they care for nothing but mischief, and delight in it.
161
Clever people are the best encyclopaedia.
