The biggest problem in this world is that the wise are always full of doubts and caution, while the fools are always in the hands of the truth and their blood is boiling.
Truly learned people are like ears of wheat, when they are empty, they thrive and stand tall, looking up; but when they are ripe and full of bulging grains of wheat, they begin to hang low, without showing their sharp edges.
Self-righteousness is a natural and primitive ill of ours. The most pitiful and fragile of all creatures is man, but he is the most proud and arrogant.
All sins arise from man's conceit. In the same way all other virtues are caused by obedience and obedience.
Opinion and the impassionedness of argument are real signs of stupidity. Is there anything as confident, determined, arrogant, contemplative, serious, and serious as a stupid donkey?
The great ills of the world, or more boldly, all the bad habits of the world are caused by the fear of being taught to admit our ignorance and to oblige us to accept everything that we cannot refute. We talk about everything according to rules and decisions.
Oh, arrogance, how much you get in the way of us!
God exhorts us to escape from the philosophy of the world, and she teaches us over and over again that our wisdom is nothing but something foolish in God's view, and that the most conceited of all things is man; that man abuses wisdom without understanding what wisdom is; that man is nothing but self-seduction, self-deception, and so on; what does God mean when he says this? These aphorisms of the Holy Spirit are so clear and vivid expressions of the point I am holding out that I need no other evidence against those who will submit to theocracy with humility and obedience.
I think that among the other proofs of our stupidity, one thing must not be forgotten is that man cannot find what is necessary for him by his own desires and expectations, and that we cannot agree not only on existing things, but also in terms of imagination and desire.
Human beings can never be omniscient and omnipotent, so the things we have formulated will not be perfect. Human intelligence has never fulfilled its mandated obligations. If it can accomplish a goal, it will set itself other higher goals to pursue continuously. Our human condition is truly far detrimental to coherence. Man has no doubt in condemning himself to make mistakes: he does not carefully diminish his obligations, he uses the standards of another creature rather than the standards of man himself. For whom exactly did he make up for things that he didn't expect anyone to fulfill? Wouldn't it be just for him not to do what he couldn't do? To condemn us for failing to meet the law is to condemn us because we are beyond our reach.
It can be believed that there are laws of nature, as we have seen in other beings, but the laws of nature have disappeared among us. That wonderful human reason pervades its domination and domination, causing it to confuse and confuse things because of its own exaggeration and capriciousness.
In order to judge the phenomena of what we accept, we must have a means of adjudication; in order to verify this means we must have an argument; to verify this argument, we need another means: thus we go in circles. Seeing that the senses themselves are so full of uncertainty that they cannot adjudicate our disputes, it must be done by reason. But any kind of reasoning can only be based on another kind of reasoning, so we are trapped in an infinite number of repetitions.
Pride corrupts humanity. Pride diverts them from the path of familiarity, makes him accept novelties, and wishes to be the head of all things, to be disoriented, to roam the path to hell, to become the teacher of error, not the child of truth.
I hate all types of arbitrariness, both verbally and in deed. I stand ready to oppose the conceit that deceives our senses. If I pay close attention to the extraordinary nobles, I will find that they are at best people like others.
Man can only be himself, and it is unimaginable beyond his power. Plutarch said: "The greatest pretentious people are those who try to talk about gods and demigods, and their arrogance is greater than that of those who do not understand music at all and judge singing..."
The end result of our search for the source is all settled in a vague surprise, a vague surprise at historical proofs, as Plutarch puts it, like on charts and maps, the furthest borders of known countries are full of swamps, inaccessible forests, deserts, and uninhabitable areas. That's why some writers talk about the most serious subjects, go the deepest, indulge in their own curiosity and ideas, and yet you find the most vulgar and childish nonsense in these writers.
Good luck and bad luck seem to me to be two dominant forces. It would be foolish to think that human intelligence can play the role of the goddess of destiny. Man's efforts are futile, and he thinks that he understands cause and effect and can begin to advance his plan.
What makes me laugh is not our stupidity, but our intelligence.
Let us now look at man himself alone, who has no foreign aid, only his own arms, and lacks divine virtue and wisdom, which is the source of all man's honor and strength and the basis of man's existence. Let's see what kind of entity human beings contain under this beautiful dress. Let him explain to me with reasoning what he thinks he is superior to other beings, what makes him believe that the miraculous movement of the heavens is changing, the eternal light of the sun, moon, and stars that proudly runs above his head, the terrible waves of the boundless ocean, all of which are designed for his needs and convenience, and have been alive for him for thousands of years? Can this poor and insignificant creature, who not only cannot control himself, but is also subjected to the manipulation of all things, claim to be the master and supreme of the universe, and imagine anything more ridiculous than this? Man is powerless to know the slightest part of the universe, let alone grasp the universe. Man thinks he has the right to say that he is the only being in the world who can recognize the beauty of the cosmic edifice and its components, the only being who can thank the builder of the cosmic edifice and calculate the growth of things in the world. I wonder, who gave him this privilege?
Finally, I would like to examine whether, by man's power, he could find what he was seeking, and whether the search he had engaged in for thousands of years had enriched him with any new strength or solid truth: I am sure he would admit—if he spoke of conscience—that the whole result of his long inquiry was nothing more than a learning to recognize his own weakness. It is only through long-term study that we affirm and confirm our innate ignorance, and in the same way that the truly learned are like ears of wheat, when they are empty, they thrive and stand tall, and look up; but when they are ripe and full of bulging grains of wheat, they begin to hang low and not show their sharp edges, and likewise, after all their attempts and explorations, in this multitude of complex knowledge and names, they cannot find anything solid and reliable except emptiness. Therefore, they abandoned their pretentious psychology and recognized their original status.
This article is reproduced for Peking University Public Communications
Excerpt from The Complete Essays of Montaigne
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