The wise man is he who understands himself well enough...

The wise man is he who understands himself well enough to make due allowance for unsane moods and variations, never concluding that a thing is thus or thus because just now it bears that look; waiting often to see what a sleep, or a walk, or a cool revision, or perhaps a considerable turn of repentance will do. He does not slash upon a subject or a man from the point of a just now rising temper. He maintains a noble candor by waiting sometimes for a gentler spirit and a better sense of truth. He is never intolerant of other men's judgments, because he is a little distrustful of his own. He restrains the dislikes of prejudice because he has a prejudice against his dislikes. His resentments are softened by his condemnations of himself. His depressions do not crush him, because he has sometimes seen the sun, and believes it may appear again. He revises his opinions readily, because he has a right, he thinks, to better opinions, if he can find them. He holds fast sound opinions, lest his moodiness in change should take all truth away. And if his unsane thinking appears to be toppling him down the gulfs of skepticism, he recovers himself by just raising the question whether a more sane way of thinking might not think differently. A man who is duly aware thus of his own distempered faculty makes a life how different from one who acts as if he were infallible, and had nothing to do but just to let himself be pronounced!— Horace Bushnell