Michel de Montaigne

The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.

We should tend our freedom wisely.

I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will, carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge and lose itself in mine.

If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself

The thing I fear most is fear.

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.

I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set chatting together, said to them, __ither I am much deceived,or by your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no very deep discourse._ To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied: _ __is for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of the verb Ballo be spelt with adouble L, or that hunt after the derivation of the comparatives Cheirou and Beltiou, and the superlatives Cheiriotou and Beliotou, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science; but as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad.

Did I know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to the bottom, and to be deceived in my own inability; but sprinkling here one word and there another, patterns cut from severalpieces and scattered without design and without engaging myself too far, I am not responsible for them, or obliged to keep close to my subject, without varying at my own liberty and pleasure, and giving up myself to doubt and uncertainty, and to myown governing method, ignorance.

...were these Essays of mine considerable enough to deserve a critical judgment, it might then, I think, fallout that they would not much take with common and vulgar capacities, nor be very acceptable to the singular and excellent sort of men; the first would not understand them enough, and the last too much; and so they may hover in the middle region.