The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays of Francis Bacon by Francis Bacon: great persons had need to borrow other men's
opinions, to think themselves happy; for if they
judge by their own feeling, they cannot find it; but
if they think with themselves, what other men
think of them, and that other men would fain be,
as they are, then they are happy, as it were, by
report; when perhaps they find the contrary
within. For they are the first, that find their own
griefs, though they be the last, that find their
own faults. Certainly men in great fortunes are
strangers to themselves, and while they are in the
 Essays of Francis Bacon |