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The Essays of Montaigne — Volume 09 by Michel de Montaigne
page 12 of 67 (17%)
OF DRUNKENNESS

The world is nothing but variety and disemblance, vices are all alike, as
they are vices, and peradventure the Stoics understand them so; but
although they are equally vices, yet they are not all equal vices; and he
who has transgressed the ordinary bounds a hundred paces:

"Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum,"

["Beyond or within which the right cannot exist."
--Horace, Sat., i, 1, 107.]

should not be in a worse condition than he that has advanced but ten, is
not to be believed; or that sacrilege is not worse than stealing a
cabbage:

"Nec vincet ratio hoc, tantumdem ut peccet, idemque,
Qui teneros caules alieni fregerit horti,
Et qui nocturnus divum sacra legerit."

There is in this as great diversity as in anything whatever. The
confounding of the order and measure of sins is dangerous: murderers,
traitors, and tyrants get too much by it, and it is not reasonable they
should flatter their consciences, because another man is idle,
lascivious, or not assiduous at his devotion. Every one overrates the
offence of his companions, but extenuates his own. Our very instructors
themselves rank them sometimes, in my opinion, very ill. As Socrates
said that the principal office of wisdom was to distinguish good from
evil, we, the best of whom are vicious, ought also to say the same of the
science of distinguishing betwixt vice and vice, without which, and that
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