Foresight Wisdom: La Rochefoucauld

"To establish oneself in the world, one does all one can do to seem established there already."
--Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

Twenty-first-century translation: Fake it till you make it.

Foresight Wisdom: Middlemarch

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. 
 --George Eliot, Middlemarch (p. 744)