Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims Part 15

377.--The greatest mistake of penetration is not to have fallen short, but to have gone too far.

378.--We may bestow advice, but we cannot inspire the conduct.

379.--As our merit declines so also does our taste.

380.--Fortune makes visible our virtues or our vices, as light does objects.

381.--The struggle we undergo to remain faithful to one we love is little better than infidelity.

382.--Our actions are like the rhymed ends of blank verses (Bouts-Rimes) where to each one puts what construction he pleases.

[The Bouts-Rimes was a literary game popular in the 17th and 18th centuries--the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others to fill up. Thus Horace Walpole being given, "brook, why, crook, I,"

returned the burlesque verse-- "I sits with my toes in a Brook, And if any one axes me Why? I gies 'em a rap with my Crook, 'Tis constancy makes me, ses I."]

383.--The desire of talking about ourselves, and of putting our faults in the light we wish them to be seen, forms a great part of our sincerity.

384.--We should only be astonished at still being able to be astonished.

385.--It is equally as difficult to be contented when one has too much or too little love.

386.--No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow themselves to be wrong.

387.--A fool has not stuff in him to be good.

388.--If vanity does not overthrow all virtues, at least she makes them totter.

389.--What makes the vanity of others unsupportable is that it wounds our own.

390.--We give up more easily our interest than our taste.

391.--Fortune appears so blind to none as to those to whom she has done no good.

392.--We should manage fortune like our health, enjoy it when it is good, be patient when it is bad, and never resort to strong remedies but in an extremity.

393.--Awkwardness sometimes disappears in the camp, never in the court.

394.--A man is often more clever than one other, but not than all others.

["Singuli decipere ac decipi possunt, nemo omnes, omnes neminem fefellerunt."--Pliny{ the Younger, Panegyricus, LXII}.]

395.--We are often less unhappy at being deceived by one we loved, than on being deceived.

396.--We keep our first lover for a long time--if we do not get a second.

397.--We have not the courage to say generally that we have no faults, and that our enemies have no good qualities; but in fact we are not far from believing so.

398.--Of all our faults that which we most readily admit is idleness: we believe that it makes all virtues ineffectual, and that without utterly destroying, it at least suspends their operation.

399.--There is a kind of greatness which does not depend upon fortune: it is a certain manner what distinguishes us, and which seems to destine us for great things; it is the value we insensibly set upon ourselves; it is by this quality that we gain the deference of other men, and it is this which commonly raises us more above them, than birth, rank, or even merit itself.

400.--There may be talent without position, but there is no position without some kind of talent.

401.--Rank is to merit what dress is to a pretty woman.

402.--What we find the least of in flirtation is love.

403.--Fortune sometimes uses our faults to exalt us, and there are tiresome people whose deserts would be ill rewarded if we did not desire to purchase their absence.

404.--It appears that nature has hid at the bottom of our hearts talents and abilities unknown to us. It is only the pa.s.sions that have the power of bringing them to light, and sometimes give us views more true and more perfect than art could possibly do.

405.--We reach quite inexperienced the different stages of life, and often, in spite of the number of our years, we lack experience.

["To most men experience is like the stern lights of a s.h.i.+p which illumine only the track it has pa.s.sed."-- Coleridge.]

406.--Flirts make it a point of honour to be jealous of their lovers, to conceal their envy of other women.

407.--It may well be that those who have trapped us by their tricks do not seem to us so foolish as we seem to ourselves when trapped by the tricks of others.