Michel Montaigne

Since we cannot match it let us take our revenge by abusing it.

How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!

In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection, otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.

He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right. . . . We sleeping wake and waking sleep.

The easy, gentle, and sloping path . . . is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

To philosophize is to doubt.

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.