The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [207]
2. Who will not be advised cannot be helped.
3. Advice most needed is least heeded.
4. If the advice be good, it matters not who gave it.
5. None can act upon advice but those who need it.
6. Advice after mischief is like medicine after death.
7. Be adviser to all, security for none.
8. Less advice, more hands.
9. In advising a friend, seek to help, not please.
10. It is bad advice that cannot be altered.
11. When well, we easily advise the sick.
12. The advice of fools is worth nothing.
13. Do not hazard your wealth on a pauper’s advice.
14. Whispered advice is not worth a pea.
Chapter 4: Affliction
1. Affliction is like the blacksmith’s hammer; it shapes as it smites.
2. Everyone has enough courage to bear others’ afflictions.
Chapter 5: Age
1. A head that is white is no maid’s delight.
2. Age, like love, cannot be hid.
3. Age will not be defied.
4. Age should think, youth should do.
5. All would live long, but none would be old.
6. Old age makes us wiser and more foolish.
7. The autumn of the beautiful is beautiful.
8. We do not count our years until we have nothing left to count.
9. Age makes many white but not better.
10. Few know how to be old well.
11. Age plants more wrinkles in the mind than the face.
12. Old is as one’s heart.
13. Age comes uncalled.
14. Old people see best in the distance.
15. Old age and the wear of time teach many things.
16. The old age of an eagle is better than the youth of a sparrow.
17. What else are the elderly but voice and shadow?
18. Old age is more to be feared than death.
Chapter 6: Ambition
1. Ambition is the growth of every clime.
2. Ambition obeys no law but its own.
3. Ambition spends unwisely what avarice collected.
4. They shoot higher who aim at the sun than those who aim at a tree.
5. Low ambition and thirst of praise: marks of the worthless.
6. One does not heed the rungs of the ladder by which one climbs.
7. There is nothing humbler than ambition when it first starts to climb.
8. There is no eel so small but it hopes to become a whale.
Chapter 7: Anger
1. Anger rides a mad horse.
2. Anger sharpens valour.
3. Anger is a bad counsellor.
4. Anger is never without a reason, but seldom has a good one.
5. Anger makes dull people witty but keeps them poor.
6. Anger punishes itself.
7. Those who are angry seldom want woe.
8. Beware the fury of a patient man.
9. The dog bites the stone, not the thrower.
10. Anger blinds the eye to truth.
11. However weak the hand, anger gives it strength.
12. Hidden wrath causes harm.
13. The remedy for anger is delay.
14. Anger is a fool.
Chapter 8: Appetite
1. One always has a good appetite at another’s feast.
2. The full stomach turns even from the honey of Hybla.
3. Seek appetite by toil.
4. A stomach seldom empty despises common food.
5. Where reason rules, appetite obeys.
6. The poor lack meat for their stomach, the rich lack stomach for their meat.
Chapter 9: Argument
1. A contentious person never lacks words.
2. A noisy arguer is always right.
3. It were endless to dispute everything disputable.
4. People may be convinced, but never pleased, against their will.
5. To treat your adversary with respect is to give him an advantage he is not entitled to.
6. A quarrel is fought with noise or fists, an argument with logic.
Chapter 10: Art
1. Art has an enemy called ignorance.
2. Art is not a thing, but a way.
3. Art may err, but nature never.
4. Art is its own expression.
5. Art strives for form, and hopes for beauty, or truth; or both.
6. Great art is eternity arrested for an instant.
7. All the arts are brothers.
8. Each art is a light to the others.
9. The perfection of art is to conceal art.
10. What takes effect by chance is not art.
Chapter 11: Artists
1. A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.
2. An artist is a dreamer who dreams reality.
3. Every artist was first an amateur.
4. The art of every artist is his autobiography.
5. Nothing can come from the artist that is not in the human being.