Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
JEREMY ROBBINS
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First published 1647
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2011
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ISBN: 978-0-14-196697-7
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
Translator’s Note
THE POCKET ORACLE AND ART OF PRUDENCE
1: All things are now at their peak, above all being a true individual
2: Inclination and ingenuity
3: In your affairs, create suspense
4: Knowledge and courage contribute in turn to greatness
5: Make people depend on you
6: The height of perfection
7: Avoid outdoing your superior
8: Imperturbability, the spirit’s most sublime quality
9: Belie your national defects
10: Fortune and fame
11: Deal with people from whom you can learn
12: Nature and art, material and craft
13: Declared and undeclared intentions
14: Reality and manner
15: Have intelligent support
16: Knowledge and good intention
17: Vary your procedure
18: Application and capability
19: Don’t arouse excessive expectations from the start
20: A person born in the right century
21: The art of being lucky
22: A person with wide-ranging knowledge
23: Have no blemish
24: Temper your imagination
25: A word to the wise is enough
26: Find everyone’s weak spot
27: Value intensiveness more than extensiveness
28: Vulgar in nothing
29: A person of integrity
30: Don’t make a profession out of discredited occupations
31: Know the fortunate, to befriend them, and the unfortunate, to shun them
32: Be known for pleasing people
33: Know how to leave things to one side
34: Know your key quality
35: Think things through
36: Size up fortune
37: Recognize and know how to use insinuations
38: Quit whilst fortune is smiling
39: Recognize things at their peak, at their best, and know how to take advantage of them
40: Be in people’s good graces
41: Never exaggerate
42: Natural command
43: Think with the few and speak with the many
44: Affinity with great men
45: Caution – use it, but don’t abuse it
46: Conquer your aversions
47: Avoid getting embroiled
48: Real depths make a true person
49: A judicious and observant person
50: Never lose your self-respect
51: Choose well
52: Never lose your composure
53: Diligent and intelligent
54: Show your mettle, but wisely
55: Bide your time
56: Quick and impulsive actions
57: Those who think things through are more secure
58: Know how to adapt yourself
59: Leave a good impression
60: Good judgement
61: Eminence in what’s best
62: Work with good tools
63: The excellence of being first
64: Know how to avoid giving yourself grief
65: Outstanding good taste
66: Make sure of a successful outcome
67: Choose occupations that win praise
68: Make others understand
69: Don’t give in to vulgar humours
70: Know how to refuse
71: Don’t be uneven, or inconsistent in your actions
72: A resolute person
73: Know how to be evasive
74: Don’t be impossible to deal with
75: Choose a heroic model
76: Don’t always be joking
77: Know how to be all things to all people
78: Skill in embarking on something
79: A genial temperament
80: Take care when gathering information
81: Dazzle anew
82: Take neither the good nor the bad to extremes
83: Allow yourself some minor slip
84: Know how to use your enemies
85: Don’t be the wild card
86: Forestall malicious gossip
87: Culture and refinement
88: Let your manner be lofty
89: Understand yourself
90: The art of living long: live well
91: Only act if prudence has no doubts
92: Exceptional sense
93: A universal person
94: Unfathomable abilities
95: Know how to maintain expectation
96: On moral sense
97: Make and keep your reputation
98: Conceal your wishes
99: Reality and appearance
100: A man free from illusion
101: Half the world is laughing at the other half, and all are fools
102: A stomach for great mouthfuls of good fortune
103: Each with the dignity proper to their status
104: Understand what different jobs entail
105: Don’t be tedious
106: Don’t vaunt your good fortune
107: Don’t appear self-satisfied
108: A short cut to being a true person
109: Don’t be condemnatory
110: Don’t hang around to be a setting sun
111: Have friends
112: Win affection
113: In good fortune prepare for bad
114: Never compete
115: Get used to the bad temperaments of those you deal with
116: Always deal with upstanding people
117: Never talk about yourself
118: Gain a reputation for courtesy
119: Don’t make yourself disliked
120: Live according to common practice
121: Don’t make a great deal over nothing
122: Mastery in words and deeds
123: A person without affectation
124: Be desired
125: Don’t keep a tally of ignominious actions
126: The fool is not someone who does something foolish, but someone who, once this is done, doesn’t know how to hide it
127: Nonchalant grace in everything
128: A sublime spirit
129: Never complain
130: Do, and appear to do
131: A gallant nature
132: Reconsider things
133: Better mad with the crowd than sane all alone
134: Have double of life’s necessities
135: Don’t be given to contradiction
136: Fully understand matters
137: The wise person should be self-sufficient
138: The art of leaving things alone
139: Know your unlucky days
140: Immediately find the good in everything
141: Don’t enjoy the sound of your own voice
142: Don’t support the worse side out of stubbornness
143: Don’t go against existing belief to avoid seeming vulgar
144: Go in supporting the other person’s interests so as to come out achieving your own
145: Don’t expose your sore finger
146: Look beneath the surface
147: Don’t be inaccessible
148: Possess the art of conversation
149: Know how to deflect trouble on to someone else
150: Know how to sell your wares
151: Think ahead
152: Never be associated with someone who can cast you in a poor light
153: Avoid stepping into great men’s shoes
154: Don’t be too quick to believe or to bestow affection
155: Skill in controlling your passions
156: Choose your friends
157: Don’t be mistaken about people
158: Know how to use your friends
159: Know how to suffer fools
160: Talk circumspectly
161: Know your pet failings
162: Know how to triumph over envy and malevolence
163: Never let compassion for the unfortunate earn you the disfavour of the fortunate
164: Test the waters
165: Fight a clean fight
166: Differentiate between a sayer and a doer
167: Know how to help yourself
168: Don’t become a monster of stupidity
169: Take more care not to fail once than to succeed a hundred times
170: Always have something in reserve
171: Don’t waste favours
172: Don’t engage with someone with nothing to lose
173: Don’t be brittle as glass in dealing with people
174: Don’t live in a hurry
175: A person of substance
176: Either know, or listen to someone who does
177: Avoid familiarity when dealing with people
178: Believe your heart
179: Reticence is the stamp of true ability
180: Never be ruled by what you think your enemy should do
181: Without lying, don’t reveal every truth
182: A dash of boldness in everything is an important element of good sense
183: Don’t hold opinions doggedly
184: Don’t stand on ceremony
185: Don’t stake your reputation on a single throw
186: Recognize faults
187: Anything popular, do yourself; anything unpopular, use others to do it
188: Be ready to praise
189: Take advantage of what a person lacks
190: Find the consolation in everything
191: Don’t be pleased with excessive courtesy
192: A truly peaceable person is a person with a long life
193: Beware the person who goes in supporting someone else’s interests so as to come out achieving their own
194: Have a realistic idea of yourself and your affairs
195: Know how to appreciate
196: Know your lucky star
197: Never be hindered by fools
198: Know how to transplant yourself
199: Know how to garner esteem – wisely, not pushily
200: Have something still to desire
201: All those who appear fools are, along with half of those who don’t
202: Words and deeds make a perfect man
203: Know the great people of your time
204: Undertake what’s easy as if it were hard, and what’s hard as if it were easy
205: Know how to use scorn
206: Realize that the vulgar are everywhere
207: Practise self-restraint
208: Don’t suffer from a fool’s sickness
209: Free yourself from common stupidity
210: Know how to use the truth
211: In heaven, everything is good; in hell, everything bad
212: Always keep to yourself the ultimate tricks of your trade
213: Know how to contradict
214: Don’t turn one stupid mistake into two
215: Beware the person with hidden intentions
216: Speak clearly
217: Neither love nor hate forever
218: Don’t act obstinately, but with care
219: Don’t be known for artifice
220: When you can’t wear a lion’s skin, wear a fox’s
221: Don’t be annoyingly impetuous
222: A person who is cautious is clearly prudent
223: Don’t be very idiosyncratic
224: Know how to take things
225: Know your sovereign fault
226: Be careful to oblige
227: Don’t believe your first impression
228: Don’t be a scandalmonger
229: Know how to divide up your life wisely
230: Open your eyes in time
231: Never let something be seen half done
232: Be a little practical
233: Don’t get other people’s taste wrong
234: Don’t entrust your reputation to another without having their honour as security
235: Know how to ask
236: Grant something as a favour before it has to be given as a reward
237: Never share secrets with superiors
238: Know what you lack
239: Don’t be too sharp
240: Know how to appear the fool
241: Take a joke, but don’t make someone the butt of one
242: Carry things through
243: Don’t be completely dove-like
244: Know how to put someone under an obligation
245: Sometimes reason in a singular and out-of-the-ordinary way
246: Don’t offer an apology to someone who hasn’t asked for one
247: Know a little more and live a little less
248: Don’t be carried away by the last person you meet
249: Don’t start to live just when life has to end
250: When should you reason in reverse?
251: Human means must be sought as if there were no divine ones, and divine ones as if there were no human ones
252: Neither entirely selfish, nor entirely altruistic
253: Don’t express an idea too plainly
254: Don’t dismiss something bad because it’s minor
255: Know how to do good
256: Always be forearmed
257: Never break off relations
258: Look for someone to help you shoulder misfortunes
259: Anticipate offences and turn them into favours
260: You will never belong entirely to someone else nor they to you
261: Don’t persist in folly
262: Know how to forget
263: Many pleasurable things don’t have to belong to you
264: Don’t have careless days
265: Know how to really challenge your subordinates
266: Don’t be bad by being totally good
267: Silken words, and a mild nature
268: The sensible person does at the beginning what the fool does in the end
269: Take advantage of your novelty
270: Don’t be the only person to condemn what pleases many
271: Someone who knows little should keep to what’s safest in any profession
272: When selling, let your price be that there is no price
273: Understand the temperaments of those you deal with
274: Have appeal
275: Go with the flow, but not beyond decency
276: Know how to renew your character using nature and art
277: Show yourself off
278: Avoid being noted
279: Don’t respond to contradiction
280: An honourable person
281: The approval of knowledgeable people
282: Use absence
283: Be sensibly inventive
284: Don’t meddle
285: Don’t perish from someone else’s misfortune
286: Don’t allow yourself to be under an obligation, either wholly or to everyone
287: Never act when passions are inflamed
288: Live as circumstances demand
289: The greatest stigma for a person
290: To combine esteem and affection is a real blessing
291: Know how to appraise
292: Let your natural talents overcome the demands of the job
293: On maturity
294: Moderation in forming opinions
295: Heroic, not histrionic
296: A man of many, and truly majestic, qualities
297: Act as though always on view
298: Three things make a prodigy
299: Leave people hungry
300: In a word, a saint
Notes
PENGUIN 
CLASSICS
THE POCKET ORACLE AND ART OF PRUDENCE
BALTASAR GRACIÁN was born in 1601 in Belmonte, Aragon. The son of a doctor, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1619, was ordained in 1627 and took his final vows in 1635. Teaching in Jesuit colleges across the Kingdom of Aragon, he was also at one time confessor to the viceroy of Aragon and chaplain to the Spanish army at the siege of Lleida, one of the battles against the French during the Revolt of Catalonia. But it is as one of the great Spanish stylists and moralists that he is best known. He wrote a series of short moral tracts marked by their elliptical, epigrammatic style, as well as a three-volume allegorical novel, The Critic (1651–7). He also wrote a major work of Baroque poetics, Wit and the Art of Ingenuity (1648), in which he exhaustively analysed the nature of the conceit-laden language then in fashion. The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence was published in 1647. A collection of 300 aphorisms, it influenced the vogue for the form in France, and was quickly translated into the major European languages. Its worldly, calculated advice has made it one of Gracián’s most popular and influential works. After being punished by the Jesuits for his consistent failure to obtain formal permission to publish, as required, Gracián died in 1658.
JEREMY ROBBINS is Forbes Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of numerous studies on Spanish Baroque culture, including Love Poetry of the Literary Academies, Challenges of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature and Arts of Perception. He is a General Editor of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies.
I would like to thank Eric Southworth for many and varied conversations on the Jesuits; these have helped immeasurably in sharpening my own thinking on the Pocket Oracle. The translation owes more than I can say to David Ingham. He has lived with it without complaint and has always been willing to discuss its many tricky problems. As ever, this is for him.
Blanco Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia, edited by Emilio Blanco (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995)
Ignatius, Letters Ignatius of Loyola, Letters of St Ignatius of Loyola, translated by William J. Young (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1959)
Romera-Navarro Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia, edited by Miguel Romera-Navarro (Madrid: CSIC, 1954)
ST St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae
1601 Baptized (8 January) in Belmonte, Aragon, son of Francisco Gracián, doctor, and Angela Morales. During his childhood he spends some years being educated in Toledo with his uncle, a chaplain.
1605 Part I of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote, published. Part II published 1615.
1609 Twelve-year truce between Spanish and Dutch. Expulsion of the moriscos (descendants of Muslims required to convert to Christianity in early sixteenth century) from Spain (1609–14).
1618 Start of Thirty Years War.
1619 Enters the Jesuit noviciate, Tarragona.
1621 Death of Philip III of Spain; Philip IV ascends throne, aged sixteen. Renewal of war with Dutch.
1621–3 After taking his initial vows, studies philosophy at the Jesuit college in Calatayud.
1623–7 Studies theology in Zaragoza. Ordained 1627.
1627–30 Teaches Latin in Jesuit college in Calatayud.
c. 1630 Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play, Life is a Dream, first performed.
1630–31 Resident in the Jesuit Casa Professa in Valencia.
1631–3 Teaches moral theology and casuistry in the Jesuit college in Lleida.
1633–6 Teaches moral philosophy in the Jesuit University of Gandía. Takes final solemn vows 25 July 1635.
1635 War with France begins (ends with Peace of the Pyrenees, 1659).
1636 Sent as preacher and confessor to the Jesuit college in Huesca. Friendship with Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa.
1637 (lost) first edition of The Hero, a short treatise describing the qualities necessary in any hero, published under the name of his brother, Lorenzo Gracián, without the required permission of his superiors, and possibly dedicated to Philip IV. René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method published.
1640 Revolt of Catalonia (1640–52.). Revolt of Portugal (1640– 68; ends with independence). Confessor to Francesco Maria Carafa, Duke of Nocera, viceroy of Aragon and, subsequently, of Navarre. Visits Madrid with Nocera. The Politician, a treatise sketching the qualities of the ideal politician, King Ferdinand the Catholic (1452–1516), published, dedicated to Nocera.
1641 In Madrid following Nocera’s arrest and imprisonment for his actions at the start of the Revolt of Catalonia. Preaches at court.
1642 The Art of Ingenuity published. Witnesses the entry (27 July) of Philip IV and his favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, into Zaragoza. Made vice-rector of Jesuit novitiate (‘casa de probación’) in Tarragona, where he will witness the unsuccessful French siege of 1644.
1643 Fall of Count-Duke of Olivares (dies 1645). Death of Louis XIII of France; regency of Anne of Austria during minority of Louis XIV.
1644 Death of Isabel of Bourbon, first wife of Philip IV. French unsuccessfully besiege Tarragona.
1644–5 In the Jesuit Casa Professa, Valencia.
1646 The Man of Discretion whose chapters offer a composite picture of discretion, published, dedicated to the crown prince, Baltasar Carlos, who dies the same year. Chaplain to the Spanish troops under Marquis of Leganés at the relief of Lleida, besieged by the French. Returns to Huesca, teaching in the Jesuit college (1646–51).
1647 Revolts in Naples and Palermo.
Publication of The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence, dedicated to Philip IV’s new favourite, Luis Méndez de Haro.
1648 Treaty of Münster (Spain recognizes sovereignty of Dutch Republic). Treaty of Westphalia (ending the Thirty Years War). Spain remains at war with France. Publication of Wit and the Art of Ingenuity, an expanded version of his earlier Art of Ingenuity.
1649 Marriage of Philip IV to his niece, Mariana of Austria, intended bride of his dead son, Baltasar Carlos. Attends meeting of Jesuit province in Valencia.
1651 Publishes part I of his allegorical novel, The Critic, under the name of García de Marlones (anagram of his full name, Gracián y Morales). Appointed chair of scripture at the Jesuit college in Zaragoza.
1652 Siege of Barcelona ends the Revolt of Catalonia in October. Concern of superiors over his publishing without the required permission of his order. General of Society of Jesus mentions criticisms of his performance as professor of theology.
1653 Part II of The Critic published, dedicated to Philip IV’s illegitimate son, Juan José of Austria, viceroy of Catalonia.
1655 Meditations for the Communion-Rail published with the explicit permission of his order, the only work printed under his own name.
c. 1656 Diego de Velázquez paints Las meninas (The Maids of Honour).
1657 Part III of The Critic published. Consequently removed from chair of scripture in Zaragoza, publicly reprimanded, placed on a diet of bread and water, and ordered to leave Zaragoza for Graus (early 1658?). This course of action approved from Rome by the General of the Society, Goswin Nickel.
1658 Considers leaving the Jesuits for another order. Rehabilitated, sent to Jesuit college in Tarazona. Dies 6 December.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Golden Age of Spain, were the period in which the country acquired a global empire and its writers and artists – figures like Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Góngora, Calderón de la Barca, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, El Greco and Velázquez – produced the defining works of Spanish culture. The Jesuit Baltasar Gracián (1601–58) is a central figure in the canon of classic Spanish literature. His Pocket Oracle, pragmatic, hard-headed and coldly calculated advice on how to thrive in the cut-throat world of Baroque society, has always been one of his most widely read works.
If the sixteenth century was the period in which Spain became the dominant Western power, the seventeenth saw its gradual but inexorable decline. Although Baroque Spain was still far from a spent force, the days of being the uncontested world power were past. Its dominant political position was arguably lost in the middle decades of the century, precisely the time Gracián was writing his best-selling political and moral treatises. Indeed, the 1640s, when the Pocket Oracle was first published, was a decade of crisis for Spain: the country was embroiled in the pan-European Thirty Years War (1618–48), was still fighting in the Netherlands (until the Treaty of Münster of 1648), was at war with France (1635–59), faced the revolts of both Catalonia (1640–52) and Portugal (1640–68) against Castilian rule, and saw the deaths of the queen (1644) and the crown prince (1646). The eventual result of this period of total war was the ascendancy of France over Spain, and whilst this was not necessarily a foregone conclusion in the 1640s, few Spaniards felt any degree of optimism regarding their country’s continuing political dominance.
Gracián was born in 1601 in Belmonte, a small town in Aragon, one of the kingdoms that made up the Spanish composite monarchy. In 1619, he entered the Jesuit noviciate in Tarragona and, after the lengthy and rigorous intellectual training for which the Society of Jesus was renowned, he took his final vows in 1635. Like most Spaniards, Gracián never left the peninsula and, aside from brief stays at court in Madrid in 1640 and 1641, his life was spent in Aragon, living and teaching in various Jesuit colleges across the kingdom. This didn’t mean that he was unfamiliar with the workings of power, at one stage being confessor to the viceroy of Aragon; nor was he divorced from major events that were reshaping Spain’s destiny, experiencing the Revolt of Catalonia at first hand – as army chaplain, for example, he accompanied the army that raised the French siege of Lleida in 1646. He was an active participant in the vibrant intellectual life of Aragon, both in its viceregal capital, Zaragoza, and in towns like Huesca where he was active in the circle around Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa, an erudite and highly cultured nobleman, famed for his library and extensive collection of antiquities, and credited as the person responsible for publishing the Pocket Oracle. (Aphorism 11 offers praise of erudite circles such as that around Lastanosa.) His experience as a member of a religious community, alongside his exposure to greater and lesser circles of power, meant he was familiar with the nature, restrictions and dynamics of hierarchical and competitive social groups, and it is how to negotiate and exploit these that the Pocket Oracle teaches.
Prior to the Pocket Oracle (1647), Gracián published a series of short treatises that delineated the qualities of The Hero (1637), The Politician (1640) and The Man of Discretion (1646). These treatises, alongside his masterpiece, The Critic (1651–7) – an allegory of human life that follows two individuals as they move across Europe in pursuit of Happiness (which is eventually revealed not to be found on earth), acquiring the skills necessary to survive in a duplicitous world – are all written in the linguistically and conceptually complex style that he theorized in Wit and the Art of Ingenuity (1648), his major work of Baroque poetics. All but one of his works are secular in focus, exploring, against a deeply pessimistic and often misanthropic vision of humanity mired in deceit and illusion, the complex skills necessary for survival and success. His only explicitly religious work was Meditations for the Communion-Rail (1655), which was also the only work he published under his own name. Modern critics sometimes assume that he wrote this to counter growing Jesuit hostility to his more worldly publications, though in fact criticism was levelled more at his disobedience in publishing these under a pseudonym without the required permission from the Society. Certainly, criticism was voiced over the fact that his three-volume allegory, The Critic, failed to include instruction in the teachings of the Church, despite being an allegory of human life from youth to old age. It is Gracián’s focus on this world rather than the next, his perceptive account of human psychology and motivation, and his concomitant emphasis on survival in the world, rather than avoidance of it, which has led many critics to see his work not simply as deeply secular in its focus, but as essentially unconcerned with religion and its teaching, and even as immoral or amoral. This view has had a major impact on the reception of the Pocket Oracle, though it is open to question, as we shall see.
The title page of the first edition of the work, published in Huesca in 1647, reads: The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence, drawn from the aphorisms found in the works of Lorenzo Gracián and now published by don Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa and dedicated to his excellency don Luis Méndez de Haro, Count-Duke. The work was opportunistically dedicated to Philip IV’s new favourite, Haro, the successor to the Count-Duke of Olivares with whom Gracián had become highly disillusioned. It was published under the pseudonym – Lorenzo Gracián – that he used for most of his works, though despite this pseudonym, it is clear that the real author was widely known and acknowledged. But what was the precise role of Lastanosa in putting together the collection, and are all the aphorisms simply culled from Gracián’s own treatises? It is now universally accepted both that Gracián himself was responsible for the collection and that, contrary to the title’s assertion, most of the aphorisms were newly coined. Indeed, Romera-Navarro demonstrates that only seventy-two of the 300 have some kind of precedence in published works by Gracián.1
But why a ‘Pocket Oracle’? The first edition, lacking all the footnotes, and so on, of modern editions, was literally small enough to fit easily in the pocket and, given its lexical and conceptual difficulty and its apparent moral ambiguity, its pronouncements have the standard features of any oracular utterance, being difficult to understand and therefore liable to being misunderstood. Unlike modern editions which number the 300 aphorisms and place the initial sentence of each in italics, the first edition of the work not only did neither, but also lacked an index. Closely printed, with only a paragraph break between aphorisms, the result is that the reader navigates the text with difficulty, finding it impossible to locate a particular aphorism. One can either read sequentially, or at random, in which case the work becomes truly oracular. The lack of italics in each of the 300 units also forces the issue as to what the term ‘aphorism’ applies, to the opening sentence or clause, as in modern editions, or to the whole paragraph? In aphorism 251, Gracián’s comment after the opening line supports the view that each ‘unit’ within the Oracle consists of an initial aphorism/ maxim (the first term being used once within the text, the latter twice) followed by a commentary, albeit that the commentary is also written in the laconic and lapidary style characteristic of an aphorism.
On stylistic grounds, Emilio Blanco has argued that Gracián wrote the first hundred aphorisms as a distinct block, and possibly even initially envisaged the work having only 100 aphorisms; certainly aphorism 100’s air of summary and conclusion is similar to that of the final aphorism (no. 300).2 Be this as it may, the work lacks any clear structure or overall thematic ordering. However, there are some discernible mini-sequences (for example, nos. 53–7, 156–8, 219–20, 277–856–7277–8213244