We see his private self - his behaviour within the family home, even in the marital bed - but we keep meeting him only through his outward habits and his would-be wise pronouncements.
"You don't make art out of good intentions," is one of Flaubert's wiser pronouncements.
Images of the Kims, and their all-wise pronouncements, fill the sensory field of every North Korean, in a way that Christianity permeated daily life in medieval Europe or Byzantium.
Its philosophical pronouncements, while wise as ever, are gently embedded in the story rather than acting as punctuation marks on each short chapter.
The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is to some degree an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge.
The use of exempla is the practical embodiment of John's Academic skepticism and probabilism: because he does not wish to appear to pass dogmatic judgment on doubtful questions, he lines up the pronouncements of the wise in support.
His life in particular was a service to god, he thought, because his testing of the wisdom of others was carrying out Apollo's charge given by the oracle at Delphi, implicit in the startling pronouncement that he was the wisest man in Greece (Apology, 21a-d).
When Peter Sellers played Chauncey Gardiner, in "Being There" (1979), his horticultural pronouncements were taken as haiku of wise governance, and we were urged to mock the mob that fell for them; but E.T. really is a gardener, and his ferrying of Gertie's flowerpot into the ship, at the climax, is a definitive index of good faith.
All you need to know is Mailer's pronouncement: "Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle".
