The Art of Worldly Wisdom is considered a masterpiece of Spanish Baroque literature. The work presents a collection of aphorisms, with commentary on various subjects, offering advice and guidance on how to live the best life and evolve as a human being. Written in 1647 by
Baltasar Gracián y Morales (1601 - 1658), a Spanish writer, thinker, and Jesuit, it is a work belonging to didactic prose. The book contains three hundred precious aphorisms with commentary, which provide a set of rules and guidelines for achieving success in a complex and crisis-ridden society, as it was in his time and continues to be today, since human nature has hardly changed at all. The work contains such relevant knowledge that it was translated into German by Schopenhauer and influenced other great thinkers such as Nietzsche, Voltaire, and Jacques Lacan.
