De prudentia in agendis.
The Weight of Words
Belief and speech must be measured by God's standard, for human weakness inclines easily to evil and rash judgment.
You shouldn't believe every word or every instinct, but things need to be weighed cautiously and patiently, according to God's standard. What a grief it is that evil is more easily believed about another person than good — and so quickly spoken of. That's how weak we are. But people who are mature don't easily believe everything they hear, because they know that human frailty — indeed, human weakness — is prone to evil and unstable in what it says and claims.
The Wisdom of Restraint
True wisdom calls for patience in action and restraint in speech, refusing to cling to one's own impulses or to spread hearsay.
It is great wisdom not to be rash in what you do, nor to cling stubbornly to your own feelings. This wisdom also means not trusting whatever people say, and not quickly pouring out things you've heard or believed into other people's ears.1
Humility as the Path to Peace
Seeking counsel from the wise, living well, and submitting to God lead to true wisdom and lasting peace.
When you have a wise and thoughtful person to advise you, seek rather to be instructed by those who are better than yourself than to follow your own inventions.2 A good life makes a person wise in God's eyes and experienced in many things.3 The more humble a person is within themselves and the more submissive to God, the wiser and more peaceful they will be in all things.4
Read the original Latin
Non est credendum omni verbo nec instinctui sed caute et longanimiter, res est secundum Deum ponderanda. Proh dolor sæpe malum facilius quam bonum de alio creditur et dicitur ita infirmi sumus. Sed perfecti viri non facile credunt omni enarranti, quia sciunt humanam fragilitatem imo infirmitatem ad malum proclivem et in verbis fatis labilem.
Magna sapientia est non esse præcipitem in agendis, nec pertinaciter in sensibus stare. Ad hanc etiam non pertinet quibuslibet hominum verbis credere nec audita vel credita mox ad aliorum aures effundere.
Cum sapiente et sententioso viro consilium habe, et quære potius a melioribus instrui, quam tuas adinventiones sequi. Bona vita facit hominem sapientem secundum Deum, et expertum in multis. Quanto quis in se humilior fuerit, et Deo subjectior, tanto in omnibus erit sapientior et pacatior.
Notes
- 1 ↩quibuslibet … verbis rendered as 'whatever people say' to capture the dative/ablative ambiguity and the sense of indiscriminate credulity.
- 2 ↩adinventiones: rare medieval formation meaning 'inventions, devisings' — here 'your own ideas or schemes.'
- 3 ↩sapientem secundum Deum: 'wise according to God' — i.e., by God's standard, not merely human wisdom.
- 4 ↩Quanto ... tanto: correlative comparative construction rendered as 'the more ... the more.'