The wise are always impatient, for he that increases knowledge increases impatience of folly... The first great rule of life, according to Epictetus, is to put up with things... We often have to put up with most from those on whom we most depend: a useful lesson in self-control.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The sharper your judgment, the more folly grates, which means intelligence carries its own tax: a running impatience with people who cannot keep up. The maxim treats patience as the cure and, crucially, as a skill rather than a mood. The hardest applications are the closest: the boss whose judgment you doubt, the relative who repeats the same error, the colleague you cannot replace. With these, patience is not weakness but self-command, the deliberate choice not to spend a relationship you need on a satisfaction you do not. Out of patience, the maxim says, comes peace, and peace is the actual goal, worth more than the momentary pleasure of being visibly right.
Practice
- Treat patience as a practised skill, not a personality trait; rehearse the pause before the correction you are itching to make.
- Reserve your impatience for folly that costs something; most of it costs only your composure, and that is too high a price.
- With people you depend on, count the relationship as the asset and the irritation as the fee; pay it without a running commentary (maxim 115 habituates to the failings).
Use this when
- Use this with bosses, in-laws, and long colleagues, the people whose folly you cannot escape and should not detonate.
- Use it as a discipline of the intelligent especially; the smarter you are, the more this tax is levied and the more it must be managed.
Ignore this when
- Don't extend infinite patience to folly that harms others or the work; tolerance of the harmless is wisdom, tolerance of the damaging is negligence.
- Don't let patience curdle into contempt worn politely; people read the withheld eye-roll, and it costs what the outburst would have.
A picture of it
A brilliant registrar works under a consultant whose caution he finds maddening, second-guessing calls the registrar knows are right. The impatience is justified and useless, so he trains himself out of showing it: he presents his reasoning, accepts the slower path where it costs nothing, and saves his push for the one case a month that genuinely matters. Two years on, the consultant trusts him with the hardest cases and backs him openly, an outcome the visible impatience would have made impossible. The folly never changed. The registrar's self-command did, and it bought him the career.
The wise are impatient by nature and patient by discipline. The discipline is what buys the peace.