Discourses: Book 4 13 : 3

Yes, but I trust you, while you do not trust me.—First, you do not trust me, either, but you are a babbler, and that is the reason why you cannot keep anything pack. Why, look you, if that statement of yours is true, entrust these matters to me alone; but the fact is that whenever you see anybody at leisure you sit down beside him and say, "Brother, I have no one more kindly disposed or dearer to me than you, I ask you to listen to my affairs"; and you act this way to people whom you have not known for even a short time. And even if you do trust me, it is clear you trust me as a faithful and respectful person, not because I have already told you about my affairs. Allow me also, then, to have the same thought about you. Show me that, if a man unbosoms himself to somebody about his own affairs, he is faithful and respectful. For if that were so, I should have gone about and told my own affairs to all men, that is, if that was going to make me faithful and respectful. But that is not the case; to be faithful and respectful a man needs judgements of no casual sort. If, therefore, you see someone very much in earnest about the things that lie outside the province of his moral purpose, and subordinating his own moral purpose to them, rest assured that this man has tens of thousands of persons who subject him to compulsion and hinder him. He has no need of pitch or the wheel to get him to speak out what he knows, but a little nod from a wench, if it so happen, will upset him, a kindness from one of those who frequent Caesar's court, desire for office, or an inheritance, and thirty thousand other things of the sort. Remember, therefore, in general, that confidences require faithfulness and faithful judgements; and where can one readily find these things nowadays? Or, let someone show me the man who is so minded that he can say, "I care only for what is my own, what is not subject to hindrance, what is by nature free. This, which is the true nature of the good, I have; but let everything else be as God has granted, it makes no difference to me."