We’re No Angels!

What is the use of those high philosophical peaks on which no human being can settle and those rules which exceed our practice and our power?

It is not very clever of [man] to tailor his obligations to the standards of a different kind of being.

May we not say that there is nothing in us during this earthly prison either purely corporeal or purely spiritual and that it is injurious to tear a living man apart?

– Montaigne, quoted in Botton’s The Consolation of Philsophy, p. 130