Cunning as a Serpent, Innocent as a Dove: The Art of Worldly Wisdom

In your affairs, create suspense. Admiration at their novelty means respect for your success. It’s neither useful nor pleasurable to show all your cards. Not immediately revealing everything fuels anticipation, especially when a person’s elevated position means expectations are greater. It bespeaks mystery in everything and, with this very secrecy, arouses awe.

Don’t hang around to be a setting sun. The sensible person’s maxim: abandon things before they abandon you. Know how to turn an ending into a triumph. Sometimes the sun itself, whilst still shining brilliantly, goes behind a cloud so nobody can see it setting, leaving people in suspense over whether it has or not

Undertake what’s easy as if it were hard, and what’s hard as if it were easy. In the first case, so that confidence doesn’t make you careless; in the second, so that lack of confidence doesn’t make you discouraged.

Take a joke, but don’t make someone the butt of one. The first is a form of politeness; the second, of audacity.

Act as though always on view. The insightful man is the one who sees that others see or will see him. He knows that walls have ears, and that what’s badly done is always bursting to come out.