公平对待命运
Most people complain of fortune, few of nature; and the kinder they think the latter has been to them, the more they murmur at what they call the injustice of the former.
Why have not I the riches, the rank, the power, of such and such, is the common expostulation with fortune; but why have not I the merit, the talents, the wit, or the beauty, of such and such others, is a reproach rarely or never made to nature.
The truth is, that nature, seldom profuse, and seldom niggardly, has distributed her gifts more equally than she is generally supposed to have done.Education and situation make the great difference.Culture improves, and occasions elicit, natural talents I make no doubt but that there are potentially, if I may use that pedantic word, many Bacons, Lockes, Newtons, Caesars, Cromwells, and Mariboroughs at the ploughtail behind counters, and, perhaps, even among the nobility; but the soil must be cultivated, and the season favourable, for the fruit to have all its spirit and flavour.
If sometimes our common parent has been a little partial, and not kept the scales quite even; if one preponderates too much, we throw into the lighter a due counterpoise of vanity, which never fails to set all right.Hence it happens, that hardly any one man would, without reverse, and in every particular, change with any other.
Though all are thus satisfied with the dispensations of nature, how few listen to her voice! How to follow her as a guide! In vain she points out to us the plain and direct way to truth, vanity, fancy, affection, and fashion aume her shape and wind us through fairy-ground to folly and error.
既然能对自己宽容何不给他人多一点耐心
It is curious that our own offenses should seem so much le heinous than the offenses of others.I suppose the reason is that we know all the circumstances that have occasioned them and so manage to excuse in ourselves what we cannot excuse in others.We turn our attention away from our own defects, and when we are forced by untoward events to consider them, find it easy to condone them.For all I know we are right to do this; they are part of us and we must accept the good and bad in ourselves together.But when we come to judge others, it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.To take a trivial instance: how scornful we are when we catch someone out telling a lie; but who can say that he has never told not one, but a hundred? There is not much to choose between men.They are all a hotchpotch of greatne and littlene, of virtue and vice, of nobility and basene.Some have more strength of character, or more opportunity, and so in one direction or another give their instincts freer play, but potentially they are the same.For my part, I do not think I am any better or any worse than most people, but I know that if I set down every action in my life and every thought that has croed my mind, the world would consider me a monster of depravity.The knowledge that these reveries are common to all men should inspire one with tolerance to oneself as well as to others.It is well also if they enable us to look upon our fellows, even the most eminent and respectable, with humor, and if they lead us to take ourselves not too seriously.
