“I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.”

“how I would hate the reputation of being clever at writing but stupid and useless at everything else! I would rather be stupid at both than to choose to employ my good qualities as badly as that.”

“Philosophy believes she has not made a bad use of her resources when she has bestowed on Reason sovereign mastery over our soul and authority to bridle our appetites.”

“I have a mind that belongs wholly to itself, and is accustomed to go its own way. Having never until this hour had a master or governor imposed on me, I have advanced as far as I pleased, and at my own pace. This has made me slack and unfit for the service of others; it has made me useless to any but myself.”

“Happy are they who can please and delight their senses with things insensate—and who can live off their death.”

“You should study more to understand that you know little.”

“When a man is commonplace in discussion yet valued for what he writes that shows that his talents lie in his borrowed sources not in himself.”

“there is nothing in the whole world madder than bringing matters down to the measure of our own capacities and potentialities. How”

“It is fear that I am most afraid of.”

“Assaulted as I am by ambition, covetousness, rashness and superstition, and having such enemies to life as that within me, should I start wondering about the motions of the Universe?”

“The more simply we entrust ourself to Nature the more wisely we do so. Oh what a soft and delightful pillow, and what a sane one on which to rest a well-schooled head, are ignorance and unconcern.”

“If it lay in my power to make myself feared, I had rather make myself beloved.”

“The majority of our polities, as Aristotle says, are like the Cyclops, abandoning the guidance of the women and children to each individual man according to his mad and injudicious ideas: hardly any, except the polities of Sparta and of Crete, have entrusted the education of children to their laws.”

“With very little ado I stop the first sally of my emotions, and leave the subject that begins to be troublesome before it transports me. He who stops not the start will never be able to stop the course; he who cannot keep them out will never, get them out when they are once got in;”

“Happiness is a singular incentive to mediocrity.”

“If a man has no heart for either living or dying; if he has no will either to resist or to run away: what are we to do with him?”

“Nothing doth sooner breed a distaste or satiety than plenty.”

“We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be."

“If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said."

“As for dying we can only assay that once; we are all apprentices when it comes to that”

“If you walk on stilts, you're still walking on your feet. If you sit on the highest throne in the world, you're still sitting on your ass.”

“Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a dominion over us, since it is by chance we live.”

“Open talk opens the way to further talk, as wine does or love.”

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself”

“We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others.”

“The way of truth is one and artless: the way of private gain and success in such affairs as we are entrusted with is double, uneven and fortuitous. I”

“[What best becomes a man is whatever is most peculiarly his own.] [B]”

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

“The Stoics forbid this emotion to their sages as being base and cowardly.”

“It is as though our very touch bore infection: things which in themselves are good and beautiful are corrupted by our handling of them.”

“To philosophize is to learn to die”

“I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.”

“Vainglory and curiosity are the twin scourges of our souls. The former makes us stick our noses into everything: the latter forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.”

“Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies. Even on the highest throne in the world, we are seated still upon our arses.”

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

“All things in it are in constant motion - the earth, the rocks of the caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt - both within the common motion and with their own. Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.”

“If any one be in rapture with his own knowledge, looking only on those below him, let him but turn his eye upward towards past ages, and his pride will be abated, when he shall there find so many thousand wits that trample him under foot.”

“I believe it to be true that dreams are the true interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them.”

“Retire within yourselves; but first prepare yourselves to receive yourselves there. It would be madness to trust yourselves to yourselves if you do not know how to control yourselves. There are ways of failing in solitude as well as in company.”

“[Sweet it is during a tempest when the gales lash the waves to watch from the shore another man’s great striving.]3”

“does know himself never considers external things to be his;”

“The danger was not that I would do wrong, but that I would do nothing”

“[Just as any foreigner is not fully human.]”

“If someone presses me to say why I loved him, I feel that I cannot express it other than by answering, 'Because it was he, because it was I.”

“He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.”

“As conversation with men is wonderfully helpful, so is a visit to foreign lands...to whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them upon those of others."--Montaigne”

“If you do not know how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take no care for it.”

“This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at nineteen, and yet would have a man to be thirty before he could be fit to determine a dispute about a gutter.”

“Many things that I would not care to tell to any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller's stall.”

“The way of truth is one and artless; the way of private gain and success...is double, uneven, and fortuitous.'