by Baltasar Gracián
Three hundred maxims from the Jesuit polymath Baltasar Gracián - a pocket Spanish oracle for navigating a world of cunning. Presented as an ivory-parchment codex: draw one by sortilegio, step through, or open the índice.
tags: wisdom, prudence, aphorisms, gracian, spanish-baroque
- de Baltasar Gracián, de la Compañía de Jesús -
The Pocket Oracle & Art of Prudence
three hundred maxims for the art of being alive among others
Hoy todo está en su auge; y sobre todo el ser personaje.
All things are now at their peak; above all being a true individual.
Three hundred short pieces of advice for surviving a world full of other people, composed by a Jesuit in Aragon in 1647. Gracián wrote them in compressed baroque Spanish that does not translate easily - every sentence is a conceptist knot. Nietzsche said Europe had never produced anything finer in moral subtlety. Schopenhauer translated him into German himself. Below: the whole oracle. The Spanish is Gracián's; the English is Jeremy Robbins's.
It takes more today to make one sage than seven in years gone by,1 and more to deal with a single person than an entire nation in the past.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI