Hamilton Salsich's Library tagged montaigne →  View Popular

To cover a man's self (as I
have seen some do) with another man's armor, so as not to discover
so much as his fingers' ends; to carry on a design (as it is not
hard for a man that has anything of a scholar in him, in an ordinary
subject to do) under old inventions, patched up here and there with
his own trumpery, and then to endeavor to conceal the theft, and to
make it pass for his own, is first injustice and meanness of spirit in
those who do it, who having nothing in them of their own fit to
procure them a reputation, endeavor to do it by attempting to impose
things upon the world in their own name, which they have no manner
of title to; and, next, a ridiculous folly to content themselves
with acquiring the ignorant approbation of the vulgar by such a
pitiful cheat, at the price at the same time of degrading themselves
in the eyes of men of understanding, who turn up their noses at all
this borrowed incrustation, yet whose praise alone is worth the
having.