The substance of the wisdom of life must be commonplace, for the best of it is the result of the common experience of the world.  Its most universal and important propositions must in a certain sense be truisms.  The road has been so broadly trodden by the hosts who have travelled along it, that the main rules of the journey are clear enough, and we all know that the secret of breakdown and wreck is seldom so much an insufficient knowledge of the route, as imperfect discipline of the will.  The truism, however, and the commonplace may be stated in a form so fresh, pungent, and free from triviality, as to have all the force of new discovery.  Hence the need for a caution, that few maxims are to be taken without qualification.  They seek sharpness of impression by excluding one side of the matter and exaggerating another, and most aphorisms are to be read as subject to all sorts of limits, conditions, and corrections.

It has been said that the order of our knowledge is this:  that we know best, first, what we have divined by native instinct; second, what we have learned by experience of men and things; third, what we have learned not in books, but by books—­that is, by the reflections that they suggest; fourth, last and lowest, what we have learned in books or with masters.  The virtue of an aphorism comes under the third of these heads:  it conveys a portion of a truth with such point as to set us thinking on what remains.  Montaigne, who delighted in Plutarch, and kept him ever on his table, praises him in that besides his long discourses, “there are a thousand others, which he has only touched and glanced upon, where he only points with his finger to direct us which way we may go if we will, and contents himself sometimes with only giving one brisk hit in the nicest article of the question, from whence we are to grope out the rest.”  And this is what Plutarch himself is driving at, when he warns young men that it is well to go for a light to another man’s fire, but by no means to tarry by it, instead of kindling a torch of their own.

Grammarians draw a distinction between a maxim and an aphorism, and tell us that while an aphorism only states some broad truth of general bearing, a maxim, besides stating the truth, enjoins a rule of conduct as its consequence.  For instance, to say that “There are some men with just imagination enough to spoil their judgment” is an aphorism.  But there is action as well as thought in such sayings as this:  “’Tis a great sign of mediocrity to be always reserved in praise”; or in this of M. Aurelius, “When thou wishest to give thyself delight, think of the excellences of those who live with thee; for instance, of the energy of one, the modesty of another, the liberal kindness of a third.”  Again, according to this distinction of the word, we are to give the name of aphorism to Pascal’s saying that “Most of the mischief in the world would never happen, if men would only be content to sit still in their parlours."[1] But we should give the name of maxim to the profound and admirably humane counsel of a philosopher of a very different school, that “If you would love mankind, you should not expect too much from them.”