Michel De Montaigne

For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.

The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts, and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

Whoever will be cured of ignorance, let him confess it.

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere." "To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

I had rather fashion my mind than furnish it.

Que sçais-je?" (What do I know?)

The easy, gentle, and sloping path . . . is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: "I settle nothing. . . . I do not understand it. . . . Nothing seems true that may not seem false." Their sacramental word is . . . , which is to say, I suspend my judgment.

The most universal quality is diversity.

The most evident token and apparent sign of true wisdom is a constant and unconstrained rejoicing.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.

A man should ever, as much as in him lieth, be ready booted to take his journey, and above all things look he have then nothing to do but with himself.

We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater to possess it

I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.

A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.

Nature has made us a present of a broad capacity for entertaining ourselves apart, and often calls us to do so, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but in the best part to ourselves.

I walk firmer and more secure uphill than down.

It would be better to have no laws at all, than to have too many.

There is nothing on which men are commonly more intent than on making a way for their opinions.