One of the principal qualifications for a gentleman, for it spurs on to all kinds of nobility. It improves the taste, ennobles the heart, elevates the mind, refines the feelings, and intensifies dignity... It can find full scope in the will when it cannot be exercised in act.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Highmindedness is the disposition that makes every other quality larger: it decides what you find worth wanting, what you refuse to stoop to, and how you treat people who cannot repay you. Its opposite is not villainy but smallness, the petty score-keeping, the pleasure taken in others' setbacks, the standard that shrinks whenever nobody is watching. The most useful line in the passage is the last: it can operate in the will when circumstances forbid the act. You may lack the power to be generous in resources; you never lack the power to be generous in judgment, in credit, and in interpretation.
Practice
- Practise generosity of interpretation daily: assume the larger motive first, especially about people you dislike (maxim 109's default, upgraded).
- Refuse the small satisfactions: the score settled, the rival's failure enjoyed, the credit shaved from a junior. Each is cheap and each costs the disposition.
- When you cannot help materially, help in the will: a name mentioned in the right room, an honest reference, a warning given in time.
Use this when
- Use this when you have power over someone's outcome; that is where largeness and smallness become visible and permanent.
- Use it in defeat, where smallness is most tempting and most watched (maxim 131 turns the same moment into an advantage).
Ignore this when
- Don't confuse highmindedness with being a soft touch; the large spirit still refuses, still enforces, still cuts losses. It simply does so without pettiness.
- Don't perform magnanimity for an audience; announced generosity is a transaction with extra steps.
A picture of it
When the contract was awarded to his rival by a margin everyone privately called political, the older architect did something the younger one never forgot: he sent a two-line note wishing him well on a difficult site, and, three months later when the structural problem surfaced, took his call and talked him through it for an hour. No fee, no audience, no mention of the tender. Ten years later, when that same rival chose a partner for the biggest project of his life, there was only ever one name.
You can be small and still succeed. You just cannot be small and be trusted with anything large.