The house looks merrier when the fire burns.And wealth is the more agreeable, and fame and power the more resplendent, when they have the joy of the mind to accompany them; since we see how that through a mild and tame disposition men can bear poverty, banishment, and old age easily and sweetly.
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IT is apparent that clothes make a man warm, not by
warming him themselves or by imparting heat to him (for
every garment is of itself cold, which is the reason that we
see those that are very hot and in a fever often shifting and
changing one thing for another), but what heat a man exhales out of himself, that the garment lying close to his
body keeps together and contracts, and when it hath driven
it inward, it will not suffer it again to dissipate. This
being the very case of external affairs too, it is this that
cheats vulgar heads, by making them think that, if they
might but enclose themselves in great houses and heap
together abundance of slaves and riches, they might then
live to their own minds. But an agreeable and gay life is
not to be found without us; on the contrary, it is man that
out of his own temper, as out of a spring, adds pleasure
and gayety to the things about him:
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