are able so easily to dispense with greater perfection."
"Magnanimity owes no account to prudence of its motives."
"To do great things a man must live as though he had never to die."
"The first days of spring have less grace than the growing virtue of a young man."
"You must rouse in men a consciousness of their own prudence and strength if you would raise their character."
Just as Tocqueville said: "He who despises mankind will never get the best out of either others or himself."[1]
The best known of Vauvenargues' sayings, as it is the deepest and the broadest, is the far-reaching sentence already quoted, that "Great thoughts come from the heart." And this is the truth that shines out as we watch the voyagings of humanity from the "wide, grey, lampless depths" of time. Those have been greatest in thought who
- ↑ The reader who cares to know more about Vauvenargues will find a chapter on him in the present writer's Miscellanies vol ii.
