Michel de Montaigne

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.

We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.

Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.

My trade and art is to live.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.

The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.

I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.