“Assaulted as I am by ambition, covetousness, rashness and superstition, and having such enemies to life as that within me, should I start wondering about the motions of the Universe?”

“The more simply we entrust ourself to Nature the more wisely we do so. Oh what a soft and delightful pillow, and what a sane one on which to rest a well-schooled head, are ignorance and unconcern.”

“If it lay in my power to make myself feared, I had rather make myself beloved.”

“The majority of our polities, as Aristotle says, are like the Cyclops, abandoning the guidance of the women and children to each individual man according to his mad and injudicious ideas: hardly any, except the polities of Sparta and of Crete, have entrusted the education of children to their laws.”

“With very little ado I stop the first sally of my emotions, and leave the subject that begins to be troublesome before it transports me. He who stops not the start will never be able to stop the course; he who cannot keep them out will never, get them out when they are once got in;”

“Happiness is a singular incentive to mediocrity.”

“If a man has no heart for either living or dying; if he has no will either to resist or to run away: what are we to do with him?”

“Nothing doth sooner breed a distaste or satiety than plenty.”

“We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be."

“If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said."

“As for dying we can only assay that once; we are all apprentices when it comes to that”

“If you walk on stilts, you're still walking on your feet. If you sit on the highest throne in the world, you're still sitting on your ass.”

“Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a dominion over us, since it is by chance we live.”

“Open talk opens the way to further talk, as wine does or love.”

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself”

“We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others.”

“The way of truth is one and artless: the way of private gain and success in such affairs as we are entrusted with is double, uneven and fortuitous. I”

“[What best becomes a man is whatever is most peculiarly his own.] [B]”

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

“The Stoics forbid this emotion to their sages as being base and cowardly.”

“It is as though our very touch bore infection: things which in themselves are good and beautiful are corrupted by our handling of them.”

“To philosophize is to learn to die”

“I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.”

“Vainglory and curiosity are the twin scourges of our souls. The former makes us stick our noses into everything: the latter forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.”

“Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies. Even on the highest throne in the world, we are seated still upon our arses.”

“When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly.”

“All things in it are in constant motion - the earth, the rocks of the caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt - both within the common motion and with their own. Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.”

“If any one be in rapture with his own knowledge, looking only on those below him, let him but turn his eye upward towards past ages, and his pride will be abated, when he shall there find so many thousand wits that trample him under foot.”

“I believe it to be true that dreams are the true interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them.”

“Retire within yourselves; but first prepare yourselves to receive yourselves there. It would be madness to trust yourselves to yourselves if you do not know how to control yourselves. There are ways of failing in solitude as well as in company.”

“[Sweet it is during a tempest when the gales lash the waves to watch from the shore another man’s great striving.]3”

“does know himself never considers external things to be his;”

“The danger was not that I would do wrong, but that I would do nothing”

“[Just as any foreigner is not fully human.]”

“If someone presses me to say why I loved him, I feel that I cannot express it other than by answering, 'Because it was he, because it was I.”

“He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.”

“As conversation with men is wonderfully helpful, so is a visit to foreign lands...to whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them upon those of others."--Montaigne”

“If you do not know how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take no care for it.”

“This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at nineteen, and yet would have a man to be thirty before he could be fit to determine a dispute about a gutter.”

“Many things that I would not care to tell to any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller's stall.”

“The way of truth is one and artless; the way of private gain and success...is double, uneven, and fortuitous.'

“But you do not die because you are sick, you die because you are alive.”

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

“If I converse with a strong mind and a rough disputant, he presses upon my flanks, and pricks me right and left; his imaginations stir up mine, jealousy, glory, and contention, stimulate and raise me up to something above myself; and acquiescence is a quality altogether tedious in discourse.”

“Folly is a bad quality; but not to be able to endure it, to fret and vex at it, as I do, is another sort of disease little less troublesome than folly itself; and is the thing that I will now accuse in myself.”

“It is taking one's conjectures rather seriously to roast someone alive for them.”

“Moreover, vulgar and casual opinions are something more than nothing in nature; and he who will not suffer himself to proceed so far, falls, peradventure, into the vice of obstinacy, to avoid that of superstition.”

“Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.... The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.”

“for as I know only too well from experience when we lose those we love there is no consolation sweeter than the knowledge of having remembered to tell them everything and to have enjoyed the most perfect and absolute communication with them.”

“[Folly never thinks it has enough, even when it obtains what it desires, but Wisdom is happy with what is to hand and is never vexed with itself.]3”