Cultivate those who can teach you. Let friendly intercourse be a school of knowledge, and culture be taught through conversation: thus you make your friends your teachers and mingle the pleasures of conversation with the advantages of instruction. Sensible persons thus enjoy alternating pleasures: they reap applause for what they say, and gain instruction from what they hear. We are always attracted to others by our own interest, but in this case, it is of a higher kind. Wise men frequent the houses of great noblemen not because they are temples of vanity, but as theatres of good breeding. There be gentlemen who have the credit of worldly wisdom, because they are not only themselves oracles of all nobleness by their example and their behavior, but those who surround them form a well-bred academy of worldly wisdom of the best and noblest kind. -- Baltasar Gracian -- Translated by JOSEPH JACOBS How can we best use these words of a man who lived in the 17th Cen...
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