Topic
Judgment in this collection is most reliable when it is slowest. Franklin's developmental sequence — will at twenty, wit at thirty, judgment at forty — gives it a chronological location: judgment is what arrives when the will's confidence and the wit's cleverness have been tested long enough to become calibrated. Emerson on dreams as the truest test of natural character inverts the usual assumption: the self-edited waking person is less reliable than the uncensored dreamer. Beecher on judging people not by their peak but by the distance traveled from their starting point is the most generous formulation. Twain on books and covers is the folk wisdom. Hemingway on writers not judging but understanding sets a professional standard: judgment in art is not evaluation but comprehension. Charles Lamb's no-lawyer-without-two-sides is the procedural instruction: sound judgment requires inhabiting more than one position before settling on any. What the collection argues is that judgment is not natural but acquired, and the main cost of acquiring it is the humility of having been wrong.
He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions, such a man is a mere article of the world’s furniture.
My thoughts,—these are the wantons for me.
I am he whom you may see any afternoon sitting by himself and musing in D'Argenson's seat.
For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it.
The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations.
As to going home, shame opposed the best motions that offered to my thoughts, and it immediately occurred to me how I should be laughed at among the neighbours.
The most galling of yokes is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.