As For Externals

“It seems to me that all peculiar and out-of-the-way fashions come rather from folly and ambitious affectation than from true reason, and that the wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms. Society in general can do without our thoughts; but the rest—our actions, our work, our fortunes, and our very life—we must lend and abandon to its service and to the common opinions.” (I:23, 86, Frame)

Off the Hinges of Reason

“The laws of conscience, which we say are born of nature, are born of custom. Each man, holding in inward veneration the opinions and the behavior approved and accepted around him, cannot break loose from them without remorse, or apply himself to them without self-satisfaction. When the Cretans in times past wanted to curse someone, they would pray the gods to entice him into some bad habit. But the principal effect of the power of custom is to seize and ensnare us in such a way that it is hardly within our power to get ourselves back out of its grip and return into ourselves to reflect and reason about its ordinances. In truth, because we drink them with our milk from birth, and because the face of the world presents itself in this aspect to our first view, it seems that we are born on condition of following this course. And the common notions that we find in credit around us and infused into our soul by our fathers’ seed, these seem to be the universal and natural ones. Whence it comes to pass that what is of the hinges of custom, people believe to be off the hinges of reason: God knows how unreasonably, most of the time. If, as we who study ourselves have learned to do, each man who hears a true statement immediately considered how it properly pertains to him, each man would find that it is not so much a good saying as a good whiplash to the ordinary stupidity of his judgment. But men receive the advice of truth and its precepts as if addressed to the common people, never to themselves; and each man, instead of incorporating them into his behavior, incorporates them into his memory, very stupidly and uselessly.” (I:23, 83, Frame)

Some Human Potentiality

“So in the study that I am making of our behavior and motives, fabulous testimonies, provided they are possible, serve like true ones. Whether they have happened or no, in Paris or Rome, to John or Peter, they exemplify, at all events, some human potentiality, and thus their telling imparts useful information to me…. There are authors whose end is to tell what has happened. Mine, if I could attain it, would be to talk about what can happen.” (I:21, 75, Frame) Cf. Hirschman, A Bias for Hope.

One Step at a Time

“Even as I have experienced in many other occasions what Caesar says, that things often appear greater to us from a distance than near, so I have found that when I was healthy I had a much greater horror of sicknesses than when I felt them. The good spirits, pleasure, and strength I now enjoy make the other state appear to me so disproportionate to this one, that by imagination I magnify those inconveniences by half, and think of them as much heavier than I find they are when I have them on my shoulders…. Let us see how, in those ordinary changes and declines that we suffer, nature hides from us the sense of our loss and decay. What has an old man left of the vigor of his youth, and of his past life?

“Alas! how scant a share of life the old have left! MAXIMIANUS

“Caesar, observing the decrepit appearance of a soldier of his guard, an exhausted and broken man, who came to him in the street to ask leave to kill himself, replied humorously: ‘So you think you’re alive.’ If we fell into such a change suddenly, I don’t think we could endure it. But, when we are led by Nature’s hand down a gentle and virtually imperceptible slope, bit by bit, one step at a time, she rolls us into this wretched state and makes us familiar with it; so that we feel no shock when youth dies within us, which in essence and in truth is a harder death than the complete death of a languishing life or the death of old age; inasmuch as the leap is not so cruel from a painful life to no life as from a sweet and flourishing life to a grievous and painful one.” (I:20, 63, Frame)

No More Pretending

“In everything else there may be sham: the fine reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain French, we must show what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot…. I leave it to death to test the fruit of my studies. We shall see then whether my reasonings come from my mouth or from my heart.” (I:19, 55, Frame)

“The Thing I Fear Most is Fear”

“Those who have been well drubbed in some battle, and who are still all wounded and bloody—you can perfectly well bring them back to the charge the next day. But those who have conceived a healthy fear of the enemy—you would never get them to look him in the face. Those who are in pressing gear of losing their property, of being exiled, of being subjugated, live in constant anguish, losing even the capacity to drink, eat, and res; whereas the poor, the exiles, and the slaves often live as joyfully as other men.” (I:18, 53, Frame) Cf. James, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake.”

To Judge of Great and Lofty Things

“Each man is as well or as badly off as he thinks he is. Not the man of whom it is thought, but the one who thinks it of himself, is happy. And by just this fact belief gains reality and truth. Fortune does us neither good nor harm; she only offers us the material and the seed of them, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as it pleases, sole cause and mistress of its happy or unhappy condition. External circumstances take their savor and color from the inner constitution, just as clothes keep us warm not by their heat but by our own, which they are fitted to foster and nourish; he who would shelter a cold body with them would get the same service for cold; thus are snow and ice preserved…. Things are not that painful or difficult of themselves; it is our weakness and cowardice that make them so. To judge of great and lofty things we need a soul of the same caliber; otherwise we attribute to them the vice that is our won. A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it.” (I:15, 47, Frame)

What We Bring to Them

“That our opinion gives value to things is seen by the many things that we do not think about even to appraise them, preferring to think about ourselves instead. We consider neither their qualities not their uses, but only the cost of us getting them, as if that were some part of their substance; and we call value in them not what they bring, but what we bring to them. At which point I note that we are great economizers of our expenditure. According as it weighs, it serves by the very fact that it weighs. Our opinion never lets it run at a false valuation. Purchase gives value to the diamond, and difficulty to virtue, and pain to piety, and harshness to medicine.” (I:14, 43, Frame)