These are the pitfalls that most frequently threaten that daring that we
sometimes find in the timid.

Their very defects preventing them from making proper comparisons, they
are altogether too prone to ignore their faults and to magnify their
virtues and so fall an easy prey to the designer and the sharper.

Their very carelessness in estimating other people becomes the
foundation of an involuntary partiality the moment they are called upon
to judge their own actions.

It is not deliberate self-indulgence that drives them to act in this
way, but their inexperience, which gives rise in them to the desire for
perfection, and this necessarily provokes, simultaneously with the
despair caused by their failure to attain it, a fear of having this
failure remarked or commented upon.

The man who possesses poise is too familiar with the realities of life
not to be aware that the search for such an ideal is a Utopian dream.

But he is also aware that, if actual perfection does not exist, it is
the bounden duty of man to struggle always in pursuit of good and to
show appreciation of it in whatsoever form it may manifest itself.

Sincerity toward himself thus becomes for him an easy matter indeed, and
for the very reason that his poise leaves him absolutely free to form a
correct estimate of others.

Serious self-examination throws a clear light for him upon those merits
of which he has a right to be proud, while revealing to him at the same