The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Spanish Jesuit priest and philosopher Baltasar Gracián collected 300 maxims, each followed by a commentary, offering guidance on how to live fully, rise in society and become a better person. The collection grew popular throughout Europe. Gracian's superiors disapproved of his sermons and writings, but later thinkers admired him: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche valued the depth of his observations, and Schopenhauer translated the work into German, where his version became the most widely read. It was once thought to be a mere compilation of sentences from Gracian's earlier books, though that holds only for the first hundred aphorisms. Joseph Jacobs produced one of its English translations.

Marvin Liao of 500 Startups named it in a Book-Talk interview among the books that completely changed how he saw everything and set his life on a new course.