This best-selling book of advice on how to achieve personal and professional success is valued for its timeless insights on how to make one`s way in the world. Written in the seventeenth century by a Spanish Jesuit, these teachings are strikingly modern in tone, putting strategy above ethics while reminding the reader that the true search for excellence begns with perfecting oneself. Balthasar Graci?n (1601-1658) was born in Belmonte, a village in northeast Spain. At the age of eighteen, he joined the Jesuit order and eventually became a chaplain, preacher, and professor as well as rector and vice-rector of several Jesuit colleges. His best-known work, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, was translated into a dozen European languages and several times into English.