The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [8]
4. But those who wish to learn more, even if they know nothing, they are wise.
5. The best have said: much I learned from my teacher, more from my colleagues, most from my pupils.
6. The wise judge everyone with scales weighted in their favour.
7. The wise see others with a liberal eye, not begrudging their good, neither wishing them ill.
8. The wise are as quick to carry out small duties as great ones.
9. The wise would rather be least among the best than first among the worst:
10. As they have said, be rather a tail to a lion than a head to a jackal.
11. The wise know that the right course is whatever a man deems praiseworthy,
12. Among whatever is deemed praiseworthy by well-judging persons.
13. Hope is the armour of the wise, kindness their weapon, courage their mount;
14. And the destination of all their journeys is understanding.
15. The question to be asked at the end of each day is, ‘How long will you delay to be wise?’
Chapter 3
1. A human life is less than a thousand months long. The wise are those who multiply their months by endeavour, living many lives in the fullness of one life.
2. For we are everywhere under sentence, but with an indefinite reprieve: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more.
3. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song.
4. The wise see that our great chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as much as possible into the given time.
5. Passion may offer a quickened sense of life, may give the ecstasy and the sorrow of love:
6. The wise say, let us only be sure that it yields the fruit of a true and multiplied consciousness.
7. Of such wisdom the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art,
8. The desire of knowledge for its own sake and the sake of the human good, has most.
9. To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
10. The wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark of a stereotyped world,
11. And it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two things seem alike.
12. And the wise say: while all melts away under our feet, let us grasp at the exquisite passion,
13. Let us use the knowledge that by a lifted horizon sets the heart free;
14. Or that does so by the stirring of the senses, by colours, perfumes, the work of the artist’s hand, the face of a friend;
15. Not to recognise, every moment, some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of their ways,
16. Is, in life’s short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.
17. With this sense of the splendour of experience and its awful brevity,
18. Gathering all we are into one profound effort to see, to love, to achieve, to understand, we shall have time enough to live.
19. Let us ever curiously test new ideas and court new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy.
20. Philosophy may help us gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded, for philosophy is the microscope of thought;
21. But theory which requires the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest we cannot enter, has no claim upon us.
22. It is life itself that has the first and last claim, and it is the fresh light and clear air that wisdom brings to life that answers it,
23. For to love and to strive, to seek to know, to attend to the best that has been thought, said and done in the world, and to learn from it, is wisdom:
24. And wisdom is life.
25. The question to be asked at the end of each day is, ‘How long will you delay to be wise?’
Chapter 4
1. Who or what is the best counsellor, to counsel us to be wise? Nothing less than life itself.
2. The beginning of wisdom is the question, the end of wisdom is acceptance;
3. But in the interval, it is not enough to be wise only with the wisdom of one’s day, for wisdom is of all time.
4. To be wise is to know when to act, and when to leave alone.
5. To be wise is to know when to speak, and when to be silent.