No man can carry better baggage on his journey than wisdom.
There is no better friend than great common sense.
But the wise man should not show himself to be wise without occasion. He should remember that the majority of men are not wise, and he should be careful not to show his superiority over them unnecessarily. Neither should be despise men who do not happen to be as wise as himself:
No man is so good but there is a flaw in him, nor so bad as to be good for nothing.
Middling wise should every man be; never overwise. Those who know many things rarely lead the happiest life.
Middling wise should every man be; never overwise. No man should know his fate beforehand; so shall he live freest from care.
Middling wise should every man be, never too wise. A wise man’s heart is seldom glad, if its owner be a true sage.
This is the ancient wisdom also of Solomon “He that increases wisdom increases sorrow.” But how very true as worldly wisdom these little Northern sentences are. That a man who knows a little of many things, and no one thing perfectly, is the happiest man—this certainly is even more true to-day than it was a thousand years ago. Spencer has well observed that the man who can influence his generation, is never the man greatly in advance of his time, but only the man who is very slightly better than his fellows. The man who is very superior is likely to be ignored or disliked. Mediocrity can not help disliking superiority; and as the old Northern sage declared, “the average of men is but moiety.” Moiety does not mean necessarily mediocrity, but also that which is below mediocrity. What we call in England to-day, as Matthew Arnold called it, the Philistine element, continues to prove in our own time, to almost every superior man, the danger of being too wise.
Interesting in another way, and altogether more agreeable, are the old sayings about friendship: “Know this, if thou hast a trusty friend, go and see him often; because a road which is seldom trod gets choked with brambles and high grass.”
Be not thou the first to break off from thy friend. Sorrow will eat thy heart if thou lackest the friend to open thy heart to.