#misjudgment — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

WIST Quotations @[email protected] · 2026-08-12 · 20:41 UTC

Why cannot we remember all the contradictions which we feel within our own judgement, and how many things which were articles of belief for us yesterday are fables for us today?

[Que ne nous souvient il combien nous sentons de contradiction en nostre jugement mesmes ? combien de choses nous servoient hyer d’articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd’huy?]

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) French essayist
Essays, Book 1, ch. 26 (1.26), “It Is Folly to Measure the True and the False by Our Own Capacity [C’est folie de rapporter le vray et le faux à nostre suffisance]” (1572) [tr. Screech (1987), 1.27]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montaigne-michel-de/…

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WIST Quotations Has Moved! @[email protected] · 2025-08-25 · 15:38 UTC

A quotation from Charles Mackay

The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at that time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed the ages fled. He is but a superficial thinker who would despise and refuse to hear of them merely because they are absurd. No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action; and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity.

Charles Mackay (1814-1889) Scottish poet, journalist, song writer
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, “The Alchymists” (1841)

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/mackay-charles/14856…

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