The Art of Worldly Wisdom, translated by Joseph Jacobs in 1892, is a book written in 1637 by Baltasar Gracián y Morales (a.k.a. Baltasar Gracián), a Spanish Jesuit. The book is a collection of 300 maxims, each with a commentary, on various topics giving advice and guidance on how to live fully, to advance socially, and to be a better person. The book became popular throughout Europe.
Gracián's style, generically called conceptism, is characterized by ellipses and the concentration of a maximum of significance in a minimum of form, an approach referred to in Spanish as agudeza (wit), and which is brought to its extreme in the Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (literally The Oracle, a Manual of the Art of Discretion, commonly translated as The Art of Worldly Wisdom), which is almost entirely composed of three hundred maxims with commentary. Gracián constantly plays with words: each phrase becomes a puzzle, using the most diverse rhetorical devices.
Its appeal has endured: in 1992, Christopher Maurer's translation of this book remained on the Washington Post's list of Nonfiction General Best Sellers for 18 weeks (two weeks in first place). It has sold nearly 200,000 copies.
The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica wrote of Gracián that "He has been excessively praised by Schopenhauer, whose appreciation of the author induced him to translate the Oráculo manual, and he has been unduly depreciated by Ticknor and others. He is an acute thinker and observer, misled by his systematic misanthropy and by his fantastic literary theories."
Nietzsche wrote of the Oráculo, "Europe has never produced anything finer or more complicated in matters of moral subtlety," and Schopenhauer, who translated it into German, considered the book "Absolutely unique... a book made for constant use... a companion for life" for "those who wish to prosper in the great world." A translation of the Oraculo manual from the Spanish by Joseph Jacobs (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited), first published in 1892, was a huge commercial success, with many reprintings over the years. Jacobs's translation is alleged to have been read by Winston Churchill, seven years later, on the ship taking him to the Boer Wars.

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