A classic on power to stand alongside Machiavelli and Marcus Aurelius. With aphorisms ranging from "find everyone's weak spot" to "quit whilst fortune is smiling, as all good gamblers do," this engrossing classic of the Spanish Golden Age offers pragmatic, hardheaded, and coldly- calculated advice on how to thrive in a cut-throat world. Its three hundred maxims were originally written in Spanish more than four hundred years ago and are as applicable to modern life as they are to the dynamics of Spanish Baroque society.