A person of real learning can be pleased and persuaded with relative ease, but a half-educated fool, puffed up with conceit, cannot be satisfied even by the creator himself. The partial knowledge that produces overconfidence is more resistant to correction than either total ignorance or genuine mastery.
The truly noble do not abandon their essential nature even when fortune collapses, just as a torch turned downward still sends its flame upward. Inner disposition is treated as fixed and independent of external circumstance, so adversity reveals character rather than changing it.
Rank, wealth, and outward form are discounted as measures of a person; what counts is sustained ethical conduct and the quality of one's associations. This reframes status so that a low-born person of good action outranks a high-born person of bad action.