Back when I was in high school, a mentor of mine gave me a copy of a small book that I’ve read and re-read several times over the years. The Art of Worldly Wisdom or The Pocket Oracle and the Art of Prudence,
is a book of 300 maxims and commentary written by a 17th century Jesuit
priest named Baltasar Gracián. Considered by many to be Machiavelli’s
better in strategy and insight, Gracian’s maxims give advice on how to
flourish and thrive in a cutthroat world filled with cunning, duplicity,
and power struggles, all while still maintaining your dignity, honor,
and self-respect. In many ways, The Art of Worldly Wisdom is a
how-to book on fulfilling Christ’s admonition to his apostles to be
“cunning as serpents and as innocent as doves.” Philosophers
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both admired Gracian for his
insight, subtlety, and the depth with which he understood the human
condition.
While Gracian’s maxims were directed to men trying to gain favor in
the dog-eat-dog world of 17th century Spanish court life, they’re just
as applicable to a 21st century man trying to both succeed in
a hyper-competitive globalized economy and develop an upright, heroic
character. Taken together, Gracian’s frank, incisive maxims are
reminders of the power of living with sprezzatura and that practical wisdom–the ability to do the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason—is
essential to success in life. Below I highlight a few of my favorite
Gracian maxims. I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of his book
with all 300 nuggets of wisdom and keep it on your nightstand. It’s a
great little book to flip through and read in spare moments. You’ll be a
better man for it.
Maxims of Baltasar Gracián
In your affairs, create suspense. Admiration
at their novelty means respect for your success. It’s neither useful
nor pleasurable to show all your cards. Not immediately revealing
everything fuels anticipation, especially when a person’s elevated
position means expectations are greater. It bespeaks mystery in
everything and, with this very secrecy, arouses awe. Even when
explaining yourself, you should avoid complete frankness, just as you
shouldn’t open yourself up to everyone in all your dealings. Cautious
silence is the refuge of good sense. A decision openly declared is never
respected; instead, it opens the way to criticism, and if things turn
out badly, you’ll be unhappy twice over. Imitate divinity’s way of doing
things to keep people attentive and alert.
The height of perfection. No one is born
complete; perfect yourself and your activities day by day until you
become a truly consummate being, your talents and your qualities
all perfected. This will be evident in the excellence of your taste, the
refinement of your intellect, the maturity of your judgement, the
purity of your will. Some never manage to be complete; something is
always missing. Others take a long time. The consummate man, wise in
word and sensible in deed, is admitted into, and even sought out for,
the singular company of the discreet.
Don’t arouse excessive expectations from the start.
Everything initially highly praised is commonly discredited when it
subsequently fails to live up to expectation. Reality can never match
our expectations, because it’s easy to imagine perfection, and very
difficult to achieve it. Imagination weds desire and then conceives
things far greater than they actually are. However great anything
excellent is, it’s never enough to satisfy our idea of it and, misled by
excessive expectation, we’re more likely to feel disillusionment than
admiration. Hope is a great falsifier of truth. Good should rectify
this, making sure enjoyment surpasses desire. Good beginnings serve to
arouse curiosity, not to guarantee the outcome. Things turn out better
when the reality exceeds our initial idea and is greater than we
anticipated. This rule doesn’t apply where bad things are concerned.
Here exaggerated expectation is helpful, for reality thankfully
contradicts it, and what was greatly feared can in fact even seem
tolerable.
Never exaggerate. Take great care not to
speak in superlatives, whether to avoid offending truth or tarnishing
your good sense. Exaggeration is an excess of esteem and indicates a
lack of knowledge and taste. Praise arouses curiosity, goads desire, and
if, as normally happens, true worth falls short of the initial
evaluation, our expectation turns against the deception and gets even by
scorning both the praiser and the praised. The wise take their time,
then, and would rather understate than overstate. True greatness in
things is rare; temper your esteem. Exaggeration is a form of lying;
using it, you lose your reputation for having good taste, which is bad,
and for being knowledgeable, which is worse.
Never lose your self-respect. Even when
alone, don’t be too lax with yourself. Let your own integrity be the
measure of your rectitude; owe more to the severity of your own opinion
than to external rules. Stop yourself doing something improper more
through fear of your own good sense than of some stern external
authority. Stand in fear of yourself and you will have no need of
Seneca’s imaginary tutor.
Never lose your composure. A prime aim of
good sense: never lose your cool. This is proof of true character, of a
perfect heart, because magnanimity is difficult to perturb. Passions are
the humours of the mind and any imbalance in them unsettles good sense,
and if this illness leads us to open our mouths, it will endanger our
reputation. Be so in control of yourself that, whether things are going
well or badly, nobody can accuse you of being perturbed and all can
admire your superiority.
Don’t be uneven, or inconsistent in your actions: either
through inclination or choice. The sensible man is always the same in
all areas of perfection, this being a mark of intelligence. He should
change only because the causes and merits of the situation do. Where
good sense is concerned, variety is ugly. There are some who are
different every day; uneven in their understanding, more so in their
will, and even in their luck. What they approved of yesterday, they
disapprove of today, forever negating their own reputation and
confounding others’ opinion of them.
Choose a heroic model, more to emulate than to imitate.
There are examples of greatness, living texts of renown. Select the
best in your own area, not so much to follow as to surpass. Alexander
wept, not for Achilles in his tomb, but for himself, not yet risen to
universal fame. Nothing so incites ambition within the spirit as the
trumpeting of another’s fame: it demolishes envy and inspires noble
actions.
Understand yourself: your temperament,
intellect, opinions, emotions. You can’t be master of yourself if you
don’t first understand yourself. There are mirrors for the face, but
none for the spirit: let discreet self-reflection be yours. And when you
cease to care about your external image, focus on the inner one to
correct and improve it. Know how strong your good sense and perspicacity
are for any undertaking and evaluate your capacity for overcoming
obstacles. Fathom your depths and weigh up your capacity for all things.
Don’t hang around to be a setting sun. The
sensible person’s maxim: abandon things before they abandon you. Know
how to turn an ending into a triumph. Sometimes the sun itself, whilst
still shining brilliantly, goes behind a cloud so nobody can see it
setting, leaving people in suspense over whether it has or not. To avoid
being slighted, avoid being seen to decline. Don’t wait until everyone
turns their back on you, burying you alive to regret but dead to esteem.
Someone sharp retires a racehorse at the right time, not waiting until
everyone laughs when it falls in mid-race. Let beauty astutely shatter
her mirror when the time is right, not impatiently and too late when she
sees her own illusions shattered in it.
Get used to the bad temperaments of those you deal with, like getting used to ugly faces.
This is advisable in situations of dependency. There are horrible
people you can neither live with nor live without. It’s a necessary
skill, therefore, to get used to them, as to ugliness, so you’re not
surprised each time their harshness manifests itself. At first they’ll
frighten you, but gradually your initial horror will disappear and
caution will anticipate or tolerate the unpleasantness.
Never complain. Complaining always brings
discredit. It incites the passionate to disrespect you more than the
compassionate to console you. It paves the way for anyone who hears it
to follow suit and, learning of the first person’s insult, makes the
second feel theirs is excusable. By complaining of past offences, some
people create the basis for future ones, and seeking help or comfort,
they encounter only satisfaction and even disdain. A better policy is to
celebrate the benefits received from some so others will imitate them.
To enumerate favours received from those who are absent is to solicit
them from those present; it’s to sell the credit due to the former to
the latter. A circumspect man never makes public either slights or
flaws, only the marks of esteem received, for these serve to maintain
friends and restrain enemies.
Avoid familiarity when dealing with people.
It should be neither used nor permitted. Anyone who does will lose the
superiority which stems from dignity, and so lose esteem. The stars,
precisely because they remain so distant, maintain their splendour.
Divinity demands respect; familiarity breeds contempt. With human
affairs, the greater the familiarity, the lower the esteem, because
communication reveals the imperfections which reserve concealed.
Familiarity is not advisable with anyone: with your superiors, because
it’s dangerous; with your inferiors, because unseemly; and especially
not with the rabble who, being stupid and so insolent, will not
recognize the favour shown them and will take it as their due.
Familiarity is a form of vulgarity.
Know how to appreciate. There’s no one who
can’t be better than someone at something, and none who excel who can’t
be excelled. Knowing how to enjoy the best in everyone is a useful form
of knowledge. The wise appreciate everyone, recognizing the good in all
and knowing how much it costs to do things well. Fools despise everyone
because they are ignorant of the good and choose the worst.
Undertake what’s easy as if it were hard, and what’s hard as if it were easy. In
the first case, so that confidence doesn’t make you careless; in the
second, so that lack of confidence doesn’t make you discouraged. It
takes nothing more for something not to be done than thinking that it
is. Conversely, diligence removes impossibilities. Don’t think over
great undertakings, just seize them when they arise, so that
consideration of their difficulty doesn’t hold you back.
Take a joke, but don’t make someone the butt of one.
The first is a form of politeness; the second, of audacity. Whoever
gets annoyed at some fun appears even more like a beast than they
actually are. An excellent joke is enjoyable; to know how to take one is
a mark of real character. Getting annoyed simply prompts others to poke
fun again and again. Know how far to take a joke, and the safest thing
is not to start one. The greatest truths have always arisen from jokes.
Nothing demands greater care and skill: before making a joke, know just
how far someone can take one.
Carry things through. Some people put everything into the beginning, and finish nothing.
They come up with something, but never press on with it, revealing
their fickle character. They never receive any praise because they don’t
press on with anything; everything ends with nothing being ended. In
others, this arises out of impatience, a characteristic vice of the
Spanish, just as patience is a virtue of the Belgians. The latter finish
things, the former finish with them. They sweat until a difficulty is
overcome, and are happy simply to conquer it, but they don’t know how to
carry their victory through; they show they have the ability, but not
the desire. This is always a defect, arising from taking on the
impossible or from fickleness. If an undertaking is good, why not finish
it? And if it’s bad, why was it started? The shrewd should kill their
prey, not give up after flushing it out.
Don’t be carried away by the last person you meet.
There are people who believe the last thing they hear, stupidity always
going to one extreme or the other. Their feelings and desires are wax:
the most recent thing stamps itself upon them and effaces everything
else. They are never fully won over because they are just as easily
lost: anyone can dye them to match their own colour. They make bad
confidants and remain forever like children: with their opinions and
emotions ever changing, and their will and judgement crippled, they veer
along, tilting this way and that.
Go with the flow, but not beyond decency.
Don’t always be affectedly solemn and annoyed. This is part of good
manners. To gain everyone’s affection, you must dispense with a little
dignity. You can sometimes follow the crowd, but not into indecency, for
whoever is taken for a fool in public will never be thought wise in
private. More is lost in one day of relaxation than was ever gained with
seriousness. But don’t always stand out from the rest: to be an
exception is to condemn everyone else. Far less affect fastidiousness –
leave that to women. Even in spiritual matters, this is ridiculous. The
best thing about a man is acting like a man. Whilst a woman can
gracefully affect a manly air, the reverse is never the case.
Act as though always on view. The
insightful man is the one who sees that others see or will see him. He
knows that walls have ears, and that what’s badly done is always
bursting to come out. Even when alone, he acts as though seen by
everyone, knowing that everything will eventually be known. He looks on
those who will subsequently hear of his actions as witnesses to them
already. The person who wanted everyone to see him wasn’t daunted that
others could see into his house from outside.
