"Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it.--Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also; and if flies often buzz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,[68] feed them.--For _civic_ life and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love without esteeming it; learn, far as it ranks beneath _human_ life, to enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the _same sort_ of things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!--Despise anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!--If the _Second-pointer_ can be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, the _Month-pointer_ will still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this Consciousness itself!--Make not the Present a means of thy Future; for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present, which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!--Stake in no lotteries,--keep at home,--give and accept no pompous entertainments,--travel not abroad every year!--Conceal not from thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy acquaintance!--Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!--Inspect the neighborhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding of thy snail-house!--Look upon a capital but as a collection of villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk of neighbors at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation, joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!"---- And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behoove me not to make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man, to let it sound out.