Of Three Kinds of Association

We must not nail ourselves so fast to our humours and complexions: our greatest sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to divers employments. It is to be, not to live, always to be tied to one and the same course. The fairest souls are those that have the most variety and pliancy in them. I should therefore set the company of men first among my three enjoyments — but only the company of choice men, the kind who have quality both of mind and of disposition, for the one without the other is never quite what it should be.

The second commerce is with women. There is hardly any pleasure more sweet, nothing more delicious to the mind, than this communication of one with another — though it has this inconvenience, that it does not improve the mind, and gives nothing particular to the understanding. Yet the pleasure is so gentle, so natural, so universal, that it would be ungracious to despise it. I have found therein more purity, frankness, and good sense than I might have been led to expect, and I have been grateful for it.

Of the three associations, the most solid and the one that will serve me in old age is the commerce with books.

The third commerce — and by far the most constant and the most entirely my own — is with books. They accompany me through all my life, and assist me everywhere; they comfort me in my old age and in my solitude; they ease me of the weight of a tedious idleness; they rid me at all hours of company that annoys me; they blunt the point of griefs, provided they are not excessive and urgent. To divert myself from troublesome thoughts, I have no need but to have recourse to books; they never fail to draw my mind to themselves, and to steal away all other thoughts.

I feel the greatest pleasure from the conversation of able men, but I am not always equal to their company. My memory is defective, and my invention slow, and books have this advantage over men — they wait for me, they do not grow impatient at my silences, they let me return at my own pace. These three kinds of commerce have formed whatever I am, and whatever I am worth. I would not trade one of them to improve the other two.