Happiness Quote by Giraldus Cambrensis

Perfection gets demoted here from moral goal to childish fantasy, and that demotion is the engine of the passage. Giraldus Cambrensis, a medieval cleric with a historian's eye for human mess, starts with a theological-sounding premise - nobody is born without faults - then quietly shifts the standard from purity to proportion: the "best" are simply those whose errors are smallest. It's a pragmatic ethic disguised as humility, a way to keep judgment in play without pretending anyone, clergy included, can claim spotless authority.

The next move is the real tell: "let the wise man consider everything human as connected with himself". This isn't just compassion; it's a defensive intellectual posture against sanctimony. If all human affairs are "connected", then scandal, failure, greed, and violence aren't alien species belonging to other people. They are variations of the same material the wise person is made of. That framing bluntly undermines the medieval temptation to divide the world into the saved and the damned, the civilized and the barbarous - a temptation Giraldus himself sometimes indulged in his writings on Wales and Ireland. The line reads like a corrective to his era's appetite for moral hierarchy: you can describe, even condemn, but don't pretend you're exempt from the conditions you're cataloging.

The final clause - no perfect happiness under heaven - lands as both comfort and warning. Comfort, because disappointment isn't proof of personal failure; warning, because politics, piety, and pleasure all break when sold as total solutions.