Instead, he likes books when they enhance life and when they expand his understanding of the many people who have lived in the past. Biographies and histories are good, because they show the human being “more alive and entire than in any other place—the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in detail, the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him.” Terence’s plays also represent “to the life the movements of the soul and the state of our characters; at every moment our actions throw me back to him.” Montaigne was not the only humanist to
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