It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us. As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.
What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. I think I am one of those who can manage not to take on a completely different appearance under their own glance. To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.