The way to obtain a clear explanation is to listen with kindness

From the Precepts of Ptah-Hotep.

Carl Sagan once described books as breaking the shackles of time.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”

As Lord Chesterfield wrote his letters to his son and George Washington his Rules of Civility and Benjamin Franklin to all of us via Poor Richard, era to era, we try and instruct those who will come after with the sweat and blood-stained wisdom accumulated from that which went before.

Among these 4,200 year old admonishments to his son, Ptah-Hotep advises:

Be not arrogant because of that which you know; deal with the ignorant as with the learned; for the barriers of art are not closed, no artist being in possession of the perfection to which he should aspire.

If you find a disputant while he is hot, do not despise him because you are not of the same opinion. Be not angry against him when he is wrong; away with such a thing. He fights against himself; require him not further to flatter your feelings. Do not amuse yourself with the spectacle which you have before you; it is odious, it is mean, it is the part of a despicable soul so to do. As soon as you let yourself be moved by your feelings, combat this desire as a thing that is reproved by the great.

Speak not to the great man more than he requires, for one knows not what may be displeasing to him. Speak when he invites you and your worth will be pleasing.

Do not lose the daily opportunity of increasing that which your house possesses. Activity produces riches, and riches do not endure when it slackens.

The way to obtain a clear explanation is to listen with kindness.

When a man has established his just equilibrium and walks in this path, there where he makes his dwelling, there is no room for bad humor.

If you have become great after having been little, if you have become rich after having been poor, when you are at the head of the city, know how not to take advantage of the fact that you have reached the first rank, harden not your heart because of your elevation; you are become only the administrator, the prefect, of the provisions which belong to Ptah. Put not behind you the neighbor who is like you; be unto him as a companion.

And on. It is comfortable and easy to track trend-lines of thought back to the Greeks and Romans. Strange as they can sometimes seem, they are clearly cultural predecessors. The Ancient Egyptians, for some reason, not so much. And yet there they are, so accessible in their words, speaking to our common human experience.