be very happy.  Merck, the friend of Goethe’s youth, was conscious of this truth when he wrote:  It is the wretched way people have of setting up a claim to happiness—­and, that to, in a measure corresponding with their desires—­that ruins everything in this world.  A man will make progress if he can get rid of this claim,[1] and desire nothing but what he sees before him.  Accordingly it is advisable to put very moderate limits upon our expectations of pleasure, possessions, rank, honor and so on; because it is just this striving and struggling to be happy, to dazzle the world, to lead a life full of pleasure, which entail great misfortune.  It is prudent and wise, I say, to reduce one’s claims, if only for the reason that it is extremely easy to be very unhappy; while to be very happy is not indeed difficult, but quite impossible.  With justice sings the poet of life’s wisdom: 

  Auream quisquis mediocritatem
  Diligit, tutus caret obsoleti
  Sordibus tecti, caret invidenda
        Sobrius aula. 
  Savius ventis agitatur ingens
  Pinus:  et celsae graviori casu
  Decidunt turres; feriuntque summos
        Fulgura monies.[2]

—­the golden mean is best—­to live free from the squalor of a mean abode, and yet not be a mark for envy.  It is the tall pine which is cruelly shaken by the wind, the highest summits that are struck in the storm, and the lofty towers that fall so heavily.

[Footnote 1:  Letters to and from Merck.]

[Footnote 2:  Horace.  Odes II. x.]

He who has taken to heart the teaching of my philosophy—­who knows, therefore, that our whole existence is something which had better not have been, and that to disown and disclaim it is the highest wisdom—­he will have no great expectations from anything or any condition in life:  he will spend passion upon nothing in the world, nor lament over-much if he fails in any of his undertakings.  He will feel the deep truth of what Plato[1] says:  [Greek:  oute ti ton anthropinon haxion on megalaes spondaes]—­nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety; or, as the Persian poet has it,

  Though from thy grasp all worldly things should flee,
    Grieve not for them, for they are nothing worth: 
  And though a world in thy possession be,
    Joy not, for worthless are the things of earth. 
  Since to that better world ’tis given to thee
    To pass, speed on, for this is nothing worth.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Republic, x. 604.]

[Footnote 2:  Translator’s Note.  From the Anvar-i Suhaili—­The Lights of Canopus—­being the Persian version of the Table of Bidpai.  Translated by E.B.  Eastwick, ch. iii.  Story vi., p. 289.]