Worldly Wisdom

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Maxims of Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658):

  • When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.
  • To overvalue something is a form of lying.
  • Do something well, and that is quickly enough.
  • Many owe their greatness to their enemies. Flattery is fiercer than hatred, for hatred corrects the faults flattery had disguised.
  • Those who want to look like hard workers give the impression that they aren’t up to their jobs.
  • Complaints will always discredit you. … Once divulged to others, the offenses done to us seem to make others pardonable.
  • Not believing others implies that you yourself are deceitful. The liar suffers twice: he neither believes nor is believed.
  • Better to be cheated by the price than by the merchandise.
  • Because the ignorant do not know themselves, they never know for what they are lacking. Some would be sages if they did not believe they were so already.
  • Some die because they feel everything, others because they feel nothing. Some are fools because they suffer no regrets, and others because they do.
  • Some marry the first information they receive, and turn what comes later into their concubine. Since deceit is always first to arrive, there is no room left for truth.
  • To hear a prince’s secrets is not a privilege but a burden. Many smash the mirror that reminds them of their ugliness. They cannot stand to see those who saw them.
  • Some people belong entirely to others. … They have not a day, not an hour to call their own, so completely do they give themselves to others. This is true even in matters of understanding. Some people know everything for others and nothing for themselves.
  • Many pleasant things are better when they belong to someone else. … When things belong to others, we enjoy them twice as much, without the risk of losing them, and with the pleasure of novelty.
  • Imagination travels faster than sight. Deceit comes in through the ears, but usually leaves through the eyes.
  • Freedom is more precious than the gift that makes us lose it.
  • Virtue alone is for real; all else is sham. Talent and greatness depend on virtue, not on fortune. Only virtue is sufficient unto herself. She makes us love the living and remember the dead.

“Honorable beginnings should serve to awaken curiosity, not to heighten people’s expectations. We are much better off when reality surpasses our expectations, and something turns out better than we thought it would. This rule does not hold true for bad things: when an evil has been exaggerated, its reality makes people applaud. What was feared as ruinous comes to seem tolerable.”

| Literature · Quotations · Society

A Blow to Tourism

Anglican priest Samuel Peters opposed American independence and was forced to flee the colonies as the revolution approached. From London he exacted a sort of revenge by publishing a list of 45 draconian laws that he said prevailed in Connecticut, in an attempt to make the colonies look backward and fanatical. Among the sterner measures:

  • No one to cross a river, but with an authorized ferryman.
  • No one shall run on the Sabbath day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere, except reverently to and from meeting.
  • No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or shave, on the Sabbath day.
  • No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.
  • When it appears that an accused has confederates, and he refuses to discover them, he may be racked.
  • Whoever wears clothes trimmed with gold, silver, or bone lace, above two shillings by the yard, shall be presented by the grand jurors, and the selectmen shall tax the offender at £300 estate.
  • A debtor in prison, swearing he has no estate, shall be let out and sold, to make satisfaction.
  • No one shall read Common-Prayer, keep Christmas or saints-days, make minced pies, dance, play cards, or play on any instrument of music, except the drum, trumpet, and the jaw harp.
  • The selectmen, on finding children ignorant, may take them away from their parents, and put them into better hands, at the expense of their parents.
  • Married persons must live together, or be imprisoned.
  • Every male shall have his hair cut round according to a cap.

The full list is here. Peters’ hoax did have one lasting effect — it popularized the term “blue laws” to describe laws that restrict activity on Sunday.

| History · Hoaxes · Society

Kudos

“Did you hear what Howells once said to a boring author who was trying to wring a compliment out of him? ‘I don’t know how it is,’ said the author, ‘I don’t seem to write as well as I used to do.’ ‘Oh, yes you do — indeed you do. You write as well as you ever did;– But your taste is improving.”

— From a letter from John Jay Chapman to Margaret Chanler, Nov. 30, 1911

| Literature · Society

The Other Half

Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár was almost never awake until afternoon. Once when he was forced to get up early in the morning because of jury duty, he looked unbelievingly at the people crowding the Budapest streets and asked, ‘Are they all jurors?’

— Shirley Motter Linde, The Sleep Book, 1974

| Society

Having Words

It’s said that Samuel Johnson resorted to unconventional methods to win a debate with a Billingsgate fishwife:

He called her a noun, a pronoun, an adverb, and she hesitated. He vigorously charged her with being conjunction and preposition. She wavered. And when at length with stentorian voice he accused her to her face of being a parallelopipedon, she broke in disorder and fled in the utmost confusion.

(Frederic Coudert, “Lying as a Fine Art,” 1873.)

| Language · Society

Taking Pause

‘Theft’ is a concept that logically and genetically depends on the antecedent concept of ‘rightfully owned property’ — and refers to the act of taking that property without the owner’s consent. If no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as ‘theft.’ Thus, the statement ‘All property is theft’ has an internal contradiction: to use the concept ‘theft’ while denying the validity of the concept of ‘property,’ is to use ‘theft’ as a concept to which one has no logical right — that is, as a stolen concept.

— Nathaniel Branden, “The Stolen Concept,” The Objectivist Newsletter, January 1963

| Oddities · Society

Amara’s Law

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” — Roy Amara, president of the Institute for the Future, 1978

(“A modern maxim says: People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years.” — J.C.R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future, 1965)

| Quotations · Society · Technology