The place honours not the man; it is the man who gives honour to the place. Few are they who see their own faults.[104] [104] Compare Burns: O wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! Thy friend has a friend, and thy friend's friend has a friend: be discreet.[105] [105] See the Persian aphorisms on revealing secrets, _ante_, p. 48.--Burns, in his "Epistle to a Young Friend," says: Aye free aff hand your story tell When wi' a bosom crony, But still keep something to yoursel' Ye scarcely tell to ony. Poverty sits as gracefully upon some people as a red saddle upon a white horse. Rather be thou the tail among lions than the head among foxes.[106] [106] The very reverse of our English proverb, "Better to be the head of the commonalty than the tail of the gentry." The thief who finds no opportunity to steal considers himself an honest man. Use thy noble vase to-day, for to-morrow it may perchance be broken. Descend a step in choosing thy wife; ascend a step in choosing thy friend. A myrtle even in the dust remains a myrtle.[107] [107] Saadi has the same sentiment in his _Gulislan_--see _ante_, p. 49. Every one whose wisdom exceedeth his deeds, to what is he like? To a tree whose branches are many and its roots few; and the wind cometh and plucketh it up, and overturneth it on its face.[108] [108] See also Saadi's aphorisms on precept and practice, _ante_, p. 47. If a word spoken in time be worth one piece of money, silence in its place is worth two.[109] [109] Here we have a variant of Thomas Carlyle's favourite maxim, "Speech is silvern; silence is golden." Silence is the fence round wisdom.[110] [110] "Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he were sensible of this he would not be ignorant."--_Saadi_. A saying ascribed to Esop has been frequently cited with admiration. The sage Chilo asked Esop what God was doing, and he answered that he was "depressing the proud and exalting the humble." A parallel to this is presented in the answer of Rabbi Jose to a woman who asked him what God had been doing since the creation: "He makes ladders on which he causes the poor to ascend and the rich to descend," in other words, exalts the lowly and humbles the haughty. * * * * * The lucid explanation of the expression, "I, God, am a jealous God," given by a Rabbi, has been thus elegantly translated by Coleridge:[111] [111] _The Friend_, ed. 1850, vol. ii, p. 249. "Your God," said a heathen philosopher to a Hebrew Rabbi, "in his Book calls himself a jealous God, who can endure no other god besides himself, and on all occasions makes manifest his abhorrence of idolatry. How comes it, then, that he threatens and seems to hate the worshippers of false gods more than the false gods themselves?"