olute longing has determined its own limits"; "Hate is an
active displeasure, envy a passive one, and it is therefore not
surprising that envy so easily turns into hate"; "No one can produce
anything important unless he isolate himself"; "However we may strive
for the general, we always remain individuals whose nature necessarily
excludes certain characteristics, while it possesses certain others";
"The only help against the great merits of another is love"; "Man
longs for freedom, woman for tradition"; "A talent forms itself in
solitude, a character in the stream of the world"; "The miracle is the
dearest child of belief"; "It is not difficult to be brilliant if one
has no respect for anything."

Whoever falls into the habit of looking for psychologizing maxims in
his daily reading will easily bring home something which he picks up
in strolling through the gardens of literature. Only we must always be
on our guard lest the beautifully coloured and fragrant flowers which
we pluck are poisonous. Is it really good psychology when Vauvenargues
writes: "All men are born sincere and die impostors," or, when
Brillat-Savarin insists: "Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you
who you are"? Or can we really trust Mirabeau: "Kill your conscience,
as it is the most savage enemy of every one who wants success"; or
Klopstock: "Happiness is only in the mind of one who neither fears nor
hopes"; or Gellert: "He who loves one vice, loves all the vices"? Can
we believe Chamfort: "Ambition more easily takes hold of small souls
than great ones, just as a fire catches the straw roof of the huts
more easily than the palaces"; or Pascal: "In a great soul, everything
is great"; or the poet Bodenstedt when he sings: "A gray eye is a sly
eye, a brown eye is roguish and capricious, but a blue eye shows
loyalty"? And too often we must be satisfied with opposites. Lessing
tells us: "All great men are modest"; Goethe: "Only rascals are
modest." The psychology of modesty is probably more neatly expressed
in the saying of Jean Paul: "Modest is he who remains modest, not when
he is praised, but when he is blamed": and Ebner-Eschenbach adds:
"Modesty which comes to consciousness, comes to an end."

But in our system of naive psychology, we ought not to omit such
distinctly true remarks as Rabelais' much-quoted words: "The appetite
comes during the eating"; or Fox's words: "Example will avail ten
times more than precept"; or Moltke's: "Uncertainty in