“To be free of customs: “Custom clouds the true face of things”.”

“He is at one and the same time all and nothing, always different and yet ever the same, the Montaigne of 1550, 1560, 1570, 1580, the Montaigne of yesterday.”

“To free oneself of ambitions and all forms of avarice: “Thirst for glory is the most futile of all, the most valueless and bogus currency known to man.”

“To be free of family and familiar surroundings.”

“He forgets the books he has read, has no memory for dates and misplaces the momentous events in his life. Like a river, all flows over him, leaving nothing behind: no deep conviction, no solid opinion, nothing fixed, nothing stable.”

“To free oneself from fear and hope, belief and superstition. To be free of convictions and parties.”

“To guard oneself from presumption.”

“To be free of vanity or pride, these perhaps the gravest of all indulgences.”

“Books are, I find, the best provisions a man can take with him on life’s journey.”

“The power of love is not properly gauged if it is estimated only by the object that inspires it, if the tension preceding it is not taken into account - that gloomy space of disillusionment and loneliness which stretches in front of all the great events of the heart.”

“ever since he discovered that all his millions could not bring him back his wife, he has learned to despise money.”

Memory is always a bond and every loving memory is a bond twice over.”

Destiny does not always need the powerful prelude of a sudden violent blow to shake a heart beyond recovery.

“The beautiful dream of young love that ventures only on half-measures, that desires and dares not ask, promises and does not give.

“He felt a kind of bridal expectation, sweet and sensuous yet vaguely mingled with anticipatory fear of its own fulfilment, with the mysterious shiver felt when something endlessly desired suddenly comes physically close to the astonished heart.”

“Consciously or unconsciously, our education renders us slaves to morals, religion and a perceived vision of the world; our breath is the air of the epoch in which we live.”

“Only the man who remains free from all and everything augments and sustains freedom on this earth.”

“States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.” “States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.”

“the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be.” “the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be.”

“One goes wherever one is still admitted. Someone told me that I might be able to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.”

“Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don't get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.”

“Never have I experienced in a people and in myself so powerful a surge of life as at that period when our very existence and survival were at stake.”

“All office workers are afraid of being late for work.”

“and it was the pride and ambition of the Jewish people to co-operate in the front ranks to carry on the former glory of the fame of Viennese culture.”