Orts #874

. . . if I have one shoe on wrong, I also leave my shirt and my cloak on wrong; I scorn to reform halfway. When I am in a bad way, I grow bent on misfortune; I abandon myself in despair, and let myself slip toward the precipice, and, as they say, throw the handle after the ax. I persist in growing worse, and think myself no longer worth my care: either entirely well or entirely ill.
     -- Montaigne, in an essay, Of vanity


  What is the use of these lofty points of philosophy on which no human being can settle, and these rules that exceed our use and our strength? I often see people propose to us patterns of life which neither the proposer nor his hearers have any hope of following, or, what is more, any desire to follow. From this same sheet of paper on which he has just written the sentence against an adulterer, the judge steals a scrap for a billet-doux to his colleague's wife.
     -- Montaigne, in an essay, Of vanity


If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off-- though I don't know. . . . We are an object that fills us with discontent; we see nothing in us but misery and vanity. In order not to dishearten us, Nature has very appropriately thrown the action of our vision outward. We go forward with the current, but to turn our course back toward ourselves is a painful movement . . . .
     -- Montaigne, in an essay, Of vanity


   I am no longer headed for any great change or inclined to plunge into a new and untried way of life, not even a better one. It is too late to become other than as I am.
     -- Montaigne, in an essay, Of husbanding your will

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God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKpQRjj_WbU
James Comey cites this song toward the end of the first chapter of his book
A Higher Loyalty
The title has been co-opted:
https://bit.ly/2F4Twsj