Michel De Montaigne

A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted.

I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.

He who lives not to others, lives little to himself.

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

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that tied them together.

Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.

He who fears he will suffer, already suffers from his fear.

It is the part of cowardliness, and not of virtue, to seek to squat itself in some hollow lurking hole, or to hide herself under some massive tomb, thereby to shun the strokes of fortune.

Tis so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so.

I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own.

It needs courage to be afraid.

We are more unhappy to see people ahead of us than happy to see people behind us.

Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.

Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have done. I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future.

Health is a precious thing, and the only one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out not only his time, sweat, labor and goods, but also life itself to obtain it.

I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future.

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

Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.

Experience has further taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.

There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.

~The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them ~