The worst enemies are, usually, remarkably similar characters save for some single point of difference. Why? Because we find nothing more unendurable than our own vices in another. Why? Because in the other they are so clear as we have a heightened sensitivity to them, while in ourselves they are nearly always invisible.
Before we condemn, we should always ask ourselves, “do I disapprove because this thing is wrong or because I am not wise enough to see it is right?”
We find it easier to endure guilt than to change our ways. Though we deny it with our words, our actions confirm that we would prefer to have to live with what we’ve done wrong than to set those wrongs right. It is far easier to know we have ruined another life than to say, “I must find a way to take pleasure in what I now find difficult and to cease to do what harms others though at present it is my primary source of joy.” Or as La Rouchefoucauld said:
We are always strong enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
How much of human suffering stems from taking as accusal what is in truth merely playful banter? How much stems from the inability to see what is said as jest rather than joust?
The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can; and those he can not, he at any rate does not treat as aliens; and where he finds even this impossible, he avoids all dealings, and, so far as is advantageous, excludes them from his life.
In many people, honesty is simply laziness. Lying takes too much effort.
It is impossible for a man who secretly violates the terms of the agreement not to harm or be harmed to feel confident that he will remain undiscovered, even if he has already escaped ten thousand times; for until his death he is never sure that he will not be detected.
“He has wronged me!,” says one. “No, he has wronged me!,” says the other. In truth, both are always guilty — and more ironically both are usually guilty of the same exact crime: self-indulgence.
We tend to judge the quality of a man’s views on life by how he lives: this is dangerous given that we focus on the negative in men’s characters more than on the positive. The arts and the sciences should provide ample evidence that in fact much of the highest quality work is produced by men that are really no more than monsters — as always, Wagner, my favorite composer and most detested proto-Nazi, comes to mind. There is something to be learned even from hypocrites — perhaps especially from hypocrites.
To what extent is the modern condemnation of the burden of guilt merely a result of bad backs? That is to say, to what extent is the modern definition of virtue simply self-indulgence, simply vice?
There are few vices we should regret so much as condemning in another what we commit unknowingly ourselves. Nevertheless, this vice is necessary at times, which makes it something towards which we should be very, very careful. Where needed, it has value; where unnecessary, it is a thing we must spend our lives making up for having committed — a stain on our character that never washes away.