Montaigne is a 16th century philosopher who wrote during the Wars of Religion, and was mayor of my city Bordeaux.
He inspired many great thinkers and authors.
But I wonder if today there are people who have heard of him.
" Those who set out to control human actions find themselves in no way so impeded as to patch them up and put them to the same gloss; for they commonly contradict each other in such a strange way, that it seems impossible that they started from the same store. Who would believe that it was Nero, that true image of cruelty, who, as he was presented with the sentence of a condemned criminal to sign, according to the style, replied: - Would to God that I had never known how to write! It made his heart ache to condemn a man to death! Everything is so full of such examples, and indeed everyone can provide so many for themselves, that I find it strange to see people of understanding sometimes taking pains to match these pieces, given that irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent vice of our nature.
There is some appearance of judging a man by the most common features of his life; but, given the natural instability of our morals and opinions, it has often seemed to me that even good3 authors are wrong to persist in forming a constant and solid context of us: they choose a universal air, and, following this image, go arranging and interpreting all the actions of a character; and if they cannot twist them enough, send them back to dissimulation. "