“The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried.”

Book III, Ch. 9. Of Vanity
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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Do you have more details about the quote "The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried." by Michel De Montaigne?

Michel De Montaigne264

(1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, … 1533–1592

Elizabeth Goudge (1900–1984) English fiction writer

“The best known evil is the most tolerable.”
Notissimum [...] malum maxime tolerabile

Livy (-59–17 BC) Roman historian

Book XXIII, sec. 3
History of Rome
Variant: Those ills are easiest to bear with which we are most familiar.

“I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, untried pleasures.”

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) French novelist and art critic

Source: Against Nature

“I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.”

Marie Curie (1867–1934) French-Polish physicist and chemist

As quoted in White Coat Tales : Medicine's Heroes, Heritage and Misadventures‎ (2007) by Robert B. Taylor, p. 141. The original Source is the last sentence of https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1903/pierre-curie-lecture.pdf
Misattributed

“I paced up and down the little room, a queer thing happened. It was as though my wandering imagination came upon a new quality, different from all that I had ever known; yet one which was also more familiar and intimate than the smell of Plaxy in the mood of love, more piercing sweet than bitches, more hunt-worthy than the trail of a fox.”

Olaf Stapledon book Sirius

Sirius (1944)