Of Physiognomy

Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on trust. There is no harm in this; we cannot examine everything, and if we waited to know before we believed, we should believe very little. But it does mean that most of what passes for wisdom is borrowed — and borrowed wisdom is a kind of costume, not a character. The man who knows something truly, because he has lived it or tested it, is a rarer thing than is commonly supposed.

Socrates had the ugliest face among the Greeks: snub-nosed, thick-lipped, the eyes of a satyr. And yet — and this is the mystery that has occupied me for years — his face was, in the end, the most beautiful, because it was the most honest. It concealed nothing. The body of the man gave nothing away and the soul of the man was fully visible. This is a kind of beauty that has nothing to do with proportion. It is a transparency, an alignment of inner and outer, that most of us spend our lives working to prevent.

Fine wits and great learning signify nothing if they are not accompanied by a corresponding simplicity of life and conduct.

I have observed in my time that the wisest things I have heard were said by simple men — farmers, labourers, old women who had lived through trouble. They did not dress their thoughts in rhetoric. They did not arrange them for effect. They said what they saw, and what they saw was often more exact than what the scholars said, because it had been tested by experience and not merely assembled from books. I do not romanticise ignorance; I merely note that knowledge and wisdom are different faculties, and that the first without the second is a kind of elaborate foolishness.

The face, in time, becomes what the life has made it. I have seen men of mild words and dangerous eyes. I have seen men of ferocious bearing and tender hearts. The body is not a reliable text. But in old age, when the work of deception has exhausted itself, something usually shows through. Socrates wore his soul on his face from the beginning; that was his particular gift and his particular affliction. Most of us earn our faces slowly, by the accumulated weight of what we have chosen to be.