“Four hundred years have passed since Montaigne was born. It is hard to realise that this adorer of the Ancients is already becoming so ancient himself. He remains so modern — the first modern man, more advanced in many ways than this distracted world we live in, which only too closely resembles his in its fanaticism and brutality, and has so much still to learn from him. Today he seems nearer to us in mind than Shakespeare, who was younger and is as immortal; than Rousseau, who imitated his ideas and his self-revelations two centuries later; than our own grandparents. Generations have peered over Montaigne’s shoulder into the little mirror where he studied himself, to find their own features looking back at them; generations to come, for whom the most flashing novelties of 1933 have grown dull and rusty, will bend over that mirror still. That a gaily self-indulgent old gentleman in Périgord once loved scratching his ears is and will be remembered where lives, by the thousand, of desperate industry and devoted idealism leave not a ripple on the inky waters of oblivion. Such is justice. He would have been the first to smile at the irony of it. And yet it is not unreasonable. Montaigne has done more to civilise Europe by quietly recording what he was, than they by all they do. That quiet voice has filled our whole world with echoes. They meet us, disguised, in Hamlet and Measure for Measure and The Tempest. Webster wove its sentences into his bitter verse. Ben Jonson remarked in verse as bitter how good Montaigne was to steal from. Bacon followed in his tracks (Montaigne had been familiar with Anthony Bacon at Bordeaux); then Burton, and Addison, and Sterne. His influence has crossed the Atlantic as easily as the Channel, to mould Emerson and Thoreau. And in his own country, unlike Ronsard, he has never lost his place: admired as ‘l’incomparable auteur de l’art de conferer’ and detested as a pagan by Pascal; a still living friend for Madame de Lafayette and Madame du Deffand; a master for La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld, for Montesquieu and Rousseau; the sceptic ancestor of Sainte-Beuve and Renan and Anatole France.” (F. L. Lucas, 1934, The Master Essayist)

“He [Alexander Gerschenkron] spent a pleasant summer with my grandmother examining one hundred translations of Hamlet’s quatrain to Ophelia, ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire,’ in languages from Catalan to Icelandic to Serbo-Croatian to Bulgarian — all as preparation for an essay in which they argued that translation invariably distorts meaning.” (Nicholas Dawidoff, The Fly Swatter)

Erica Gerschenkron and Alexander Gerschenkron (1966), The Illogical Hamlet: A Note on Translatability. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 301–336. From the Essay: “A scholar must assume that the phenomena which he studies are amenable to rational explanations. A translator must assume that the foreign text is translatable. Those assumptions — or mental predispositions — are necessary. Without them there can be neither scholarly research nor translation. But the optimism, alas, is not always justified. Mounin’s impressive translatability thesis notwithstanding. Hamlet’s quatrain in his letter to Ophelia is a curious and instructive instance. The purpose of this Note is to review one hundred attempts — in sixteen languages — to translate those four lines. We shall try to show why in most, though not all, languages the translators had to struggle with a fundamental and actually insurmountable difficulty.”

Collections of English Translations of the Odes of Horace.

“My grandfather, Alexander Gerschenkron, was always making dramatic declarations, and one day when he was in his fifties he appeared in font of his family to announce that he was giving up the morning newspaper. He had been looking into the matter, he said and had discovered that the number of books even a non-newspaper-reading man could get through in a lifetime was so small — five thousand, according to my grandfather’s calculations — that permitting himself such a daily distraction was simply out of the question. My grandfather had been an avid reader of newspapers since the age of six, and he freely admitted that they had their pleasures and their virtues, but now, with some force, he promised that he would no longer submit to them. And he didn’t; he never read the newspaper again.” (Nicholas Dawidoff, The Fly Swatter)

“When King Pyrrhus was undertaking his expedition into Italy, Cyneas, his wise counselor, wanting to make him feel the vanity of his ambition, asked him: ‘Well, Sire, to what purpose are you setting up this great enterprise?’ ‘To make myself master of Italy’, he immediately replied. ‘And then’, continued Cyneas, ‘when that is done?’ ‘I shall pass over into Gaul and Spain’, said the other. ‘And after that?’ ‘I shall go and subdue Africa; and finally, when I have brought the world under my subjection, I shall rest and live content and at my ease’. ‘In Gods name, Sire’, Cyneas then retorted, ‘tell me what keeps you from being in that condition right now, if that is what you want. Why don’t you settle down at this very moment in the state you say you aspire to, and spare yourself all the intervening toil and risks?'” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)

“But the worst mischief of all is this, that nothing we decree shall stand firm and that we will not know that a city with the worse laws, if immoveable, is better than one with good laws when they be not binding, and that a plain wit accompanied with modesty is more profitable to the state than dexterity with arrogance, and that the more ignorant sort of men do, for the most part, better regulate a commonwealth than they that are wiser. For these love to appear wiser than the laws and in all public debatings to carry the victory as the worthiest things wherein to show their wisdom, from whence most commonly proceeds the ruin of the states they live in. Whereas the other sort, mistrusting their own wits, are content to be esteemed not so wise as the laws and not able to carp at what is well spoken by another, and so, making themselves equal judges rather than contenders for mastery, govern a state for the most part well. We therefore should do the like and not be carried away with combats of eloquence and wit to give such counsel to your multitude as in our own judgments we think not good.” (Thucydides, tr. Thomas Hobbes, 1628)

“Bad laws which are never changed are better for a city than good ones that have no authority; that unlearned loyalty is more serviceable than quick-witted insubordination; and that ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows. The latter are always wanting to appear wiser than the laws, and to overrule every proposition brought forward, thinking that they cannot show their wit in more important matters, and by such behaviour too often ruin their country; while those who mistrust their own cleverness are content to be less learned than the laws, and less able to pick holes in the speech of a good speaker; and being fair judges rather than rival athletes, generally conduct affairs successfully. These we ought to imitate, instead of being led on by cleverness and intellectual rivalry to advise your people against our real opinions.” (Thucydides, tr. Richard Crawley, 1874)

“We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they remain fixed, than with good laws that are constantly being altered, that lack of learning combined with sound common sense is more helpful than the kind of cleverness that gets out of hand, and that as a general rule states are better governed by the man in the street than by intellectuals. These are the sort of people who want to appear wiser than the laws, who want to get their own way in every general discussion, because they feel that they cannot show off their intelligence in matters of greater importance, and who, as a result, very often bring ruin on their country. But the other kind — the people who are not so confident in their own intelligence — are prepared to admit that the laws are wiser than they are and that they lack the ability to pull to pieces a speech made by a good speaker; they are unbiased judges, and not people taking part in some kind of a competition; so things usually go well when they are in control. We statesmen, too, should try to be like them, instead of being carried away by mere cleverness and a desire to show off our intelligence and so giving you, the people, advice which we do not really believe in ourselves.” (Thucydides, tr. Rex Warner, 1954)

“In addition to the biases in perception already described, observers in less-developed countries can be affected by a special difficulty in detecting changes in their own societies, regardless of any comparison with what happens or has happened elsewhere, A reason for this difficulty can be found in the image which these observers have of their own societies, in the lenses they use to look at them, or, for short, in their ideologies. It is probably a principal characteristic of less-developed, dependent countries that they import their ideologies, both those that are apologetic and those that are subversive of the status quo. There always exists a considerable distance between variegated and ever-changing reality, on the one hand, and the rigid mold of ideology, on the other. The distance and the misfit, however, are likely to be much more extensive when the ideology is imported than when it is homegrown. In the latter case, an important social change which is not accounted for by the prevailing ideology will soon be noted and the ideology will be criticized and either adapted to the new situation or exchanged for a new one. A good example is the Revisionist criticism of orthodox Marxism which appeared even during the lifetime of Engels as a result of certain developments in German society which were hard to fit into Marxist doctrine. When the ideology is imported, on the other hand, the extent to which it fits the reality of the importing country is usually quite poor from the start. Given this initial disparity, additional changes in the country’s social, economic, or political structure that contradict the ideology do not really worsen the fit substantially and are therefore ignored or else easily rationalized. The free-trade doctrine imported from England into Latin America in the nineteenth century and so poorly adapted to the needs of that continent was fully routed there only as a result of the two World Wars and the Depression. The long life of the oft-refuted explanation of Latin American societies in terms of the dichotomy between oligarchy and mass may be another case in point. On the North American Left, the notion, imported by Marxist thought, that the white working class is the “natural ally” of the oppressed Negro masses also held sway for an extraordinarily long period, considering the over whelming and cumulative evidence to the contrary. Thus, an ideology can draw strength from the very fact that it does so poorly at taking the basic features of socio-economic structure into account. Among ideologies, in other words, it is the least fit that have the greatest chance of survival! And as long as the misfit ideology survives, perception of change — and of reality in general — is held back. To illustrate the point further, I must tell one last story: A man approaches another exclaiming: ‘Hello, Paul. It’s good to see you after so many years, but you have changed so much! You used to be fat, now you are quite thin; you used to be tall, now you are rather short. What happened, Paul?’ ‘Paul’ rather timidly replies: ‘But my name is not Paul’. Whereupon the other retorts, quite pleased with his interpretation of reality: ‘You see how much you have changed! Even your name has changed!'” (Albert Hirschman, 1968, Underdevelopment, Obstacles to the Perception of Change, and Leadership. Daedalus, 97, 925–937.)

«Il n’y a que les fols certains et résolus». Le rôle de la raison, qui «est une touche pleine de fausseté, d’erreur, de faiblesse et de défaillance» (II, XII, A, 541), n’est pas de discerner la vérité, mais de détruire les vérités prétendues afin de les réduire à ce qu’elles sont: de simples opinions. Elle déraisonne lorsqu’elle veut construire. Son rôle, le seul qu’elle puisse, dans son usage théorique, mener à bien, est purement critique, destructeur. Elle s’égare et se fait sophistique lorsqu’elle engage le débat autrement que pour mettre en doute. Les principes d’une philosophie, quelle qu’elle soit, sont essentiellement douteux, puisqu’on peut leur opposer des principes contraires. Comment bâtirait-on du certain sur du douteux? Lorsqu’un philosophe se voit demander raison de ses principes, il ne peut la donner, car il ne peut remonter à l’infini. Or la raison ne se lasse pas de demander le pourquoi, d’interroger, et ainsi va à l’infini. Il suffit donc d’exercer sa raison pour mettre toutes choses en doute. Le doute est l’exercice même de la raison. Le bon usage de la raison et la certitude sont exclusifs l’un de l’autre. (Marcel Conche, 1991, Montaigne et la Philosophie)

“We are surrounded by mysteries: the mystery of the absence of outstanding leaders anywhere on this planet; the mystery of teachers no longer able to teach children to read and write; the mystery of the blurring of differences between men and women — in San Francisco even a close look does not always tell you beyond doubt the sex of a person; the mystery of a majority incapable of getting angry with those who trample it underfoot. No other century has seen so great a waste of young lives as we have seen with our eyes — not only in the two World Wars but in the 1960s. The twentieth century seems a crazed monstrous beast devouring its young.” (Eric Hoffer, 1979, Before the Sabbath)

“It is not only the fevers, the potions, and the great accidents that upset our judgment; the slightest things in the world whirl it around. And there is no doubt, even though we do not feel it, that if a continuous fever can prostrate our soul, tertian fever causes some alteration in it, according to its measure and proportion. If apoplexy completely deadens and extinguishes the sight of our intelligence, there is no doubt that a bad cold dazzles it. And consequently, we can hardly find a single hour in our life when our judgment is in its proper seat, our body being subject to so many continual changes, and filled with so many springs of action that I can well believe the doctors how unlikely it is that there will not always be one of them pulling crooked. Moreover, this malady is not so easily discovered, unless it is wholly extreme and irremediable; inasmuch as reason always goes its way, even though crooked, lame, and broken-hipped, and with falsehood as with truth. Thus it is not easy to discover its miscalculation and irregularity. I always call reason that semblance of intellect that each man fabricates in himself. That reason, of which, by its condition, there can be a hundred contradictory ones about one and the same subject, is an instrument of lead and of wax, stretchable, pliable, and adaptable to all biases and all measures; all that is needed is the ability to mold it. However good a judge’s intentions are, unless he listens closely to himself, which few people amuse themselves in doing, his inclination to friendship, kinship, beauty, and vengeance, and not only things so weighty, but that fortuitous instinct that makes us favor one thing more than another and that assigns us, without leave of our reason, our choice between two like objects, or some shadow of equal emptiness, can insinuate insensibly into his judgment the favor or disfavor of a cause, and tip the scales.” (Montaigne, tr. Frame)

“Good scholars need intelligence, creativity, persistence (Sitzfleisch), and intellectual honesty. (Luck, too, is useful.) Outside mathematics and physics, a high level of intelligence is not essential, although a modicum is obviously necessary. Creativity seems to depend both on the innate capacity of the unconscious to form associations, which cause the solution to a problem to appear when you wake up in the morning, and on the accumulation of elements between which those associations might be made. That accumulation in turns depends on a wide and broad reading of the classics and of history. The classics can provide explicit mechanisms, often in lapidary form. Historians often provide implicit or potential mechanisms, in addition to showing us the varieties of human behavior and social organization. Psychology and behavioral economics can refine the mechanisms and transform them into testable hypotheses, as well as coming up with ideas that nobody has thought of. Persistence is needed for the necessary attention to detail. It is too much to ask that scholars should have ‘the infinite capacity for taking pains’ that has been used as a definition of genius, but they should use shoe leather. Intellectual honesty may not matter much in mathematics and physics, since formal proofs and replicable experiments do not depend on the possession of that quality. Honesty (and modesty) is vital, however, in disciplines where the constraints created by deductive logic and hard facts are lacking. If someone asked me how to acquire it, I would say: Read Montaigne.” (Jon Elster, 2015, Explaining Social Behavior)