“One goes wherever one is still admitted. Someone told me that I might be able to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.”

“the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be.” “the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be.”

“States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.” “States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.”

“Only the man who remains free from all and everything augments and sustains freedom on this earth.”

“Consciously or unconsciously, our education renders us slaves to morals, religion and a perceived vision of the world; our breath is the air of the epoch in which we live.”

“He felt a kind of bridal expectation, sweet and sensuous yet vaguely mingled with anticipatory fear of its own fulfilment, with the mysterious shiver felt when something endlessly desired suddenly comes physically close to the astonished heart.”

“The beautiful dream of young love that ventures only on half-measures, that desires and dares not ask, promises and does not give.

Destiny does not always need the powerful prelude of a sudden violent blow to shake a heart beyond recovery.

Memory is always a bond and every loving memory is a bond twice over.”

“ever since he discovered that all his millions could not bring him back his wife, he has learned to despise money.”

“The power of love is not properly gauged if it is estimated only by the object that inspires it, if the tension preceding it is not taken into account - that gloomy space of disillusionment and loneliness which stretches in front of all the great events of the heart.”

“Books are, I find, the best provisions a man can take with him on life’s journey.”

“To be free of vanity or pride, these perhaps the gravest of all indulgences.”

“To guard oneself from presumption.”

“To free oneself from fear and hope, belief and superstition. To be free of convictions and parties.”

“He forgets the books he has read, has no memory for dates and misplaces the momentous events in his life. Like a river, all flows over him, leaving nothing behind: no deep conviction, no solid opinion, nothing fixed, nothing stable.”

“To be free of family and familiar surroundings.”

“To free oneself of ambitions and all forms of avarice: “Thirst for glory is the most futile of all, the most valueless and bogus currency known to man.”

“He is at one and the same time all and nothing, always different and yet ever the same, the Montaigne of 1550, 1560, 1570, 1580, the Montaigne of yesterday.”

“To be free of customs: “Custom clouds the true face of things”.”

“He has no defined destination. All roads are open to his “pensée vagabonde”.”

“He is only a philosopher in the manner of Socrates, whom he revered above all others because he left behind no dogma, no teachings, no law, no system, only an example: the man who seeks himself in all and who seeks all in himself.”

“What a man has taken into his bloodstream in childhood from the air of that time stays with him.”

“He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.”

“But society is always most cruel to those who betray its secretes, showing where it's dishonesty commits a crime against nature.”

“The writer in him is only the shadow of the man, though so often we observe men whose art of writing is so great, but whose art of living is so modest.”

“I do not subscribe to this communal error of judging a man according to the way I perceive things.”

“He desires only to preserve a few memories, assemble a few thoughts, to dream more than live and patiently await death, calmly preparing for it.”

“He makes it his task to be wholly sincere with himself, and he notes this definition of wisdom which he finds in Pindar: “True being is the beginning of a great virtue.”

“He becomes an auto-psychologist. “What do I know?” he asks himself.”

“For you cannot know the world by just navel-gazing. This is why he reads history and studies philosophy: not to draw lessons and precepts, but to understand how other men have acted in the past, so that he can compare his own situation with theirs.”

“He studies virtues, vices, flaws and merits, the wisdom and puerility of others.”

“Life is servitude if we lack the freedom to die.”

“expect nothing from the future”

“The true essence of freedom is that it can never restrict the freedom of another.”

“It is true: Montaigne achieved little else in his life aside from posing the question: “How should I live?”

“to see passion in every crime, and use that passion to excuse it.”

“..and there’s no point in a life lived aimlessly.”

“For only he who lives his life as a mystery is truly alive.”

“But travelling, even as far as to other worlds under other stars, did not allow me to escape Europe and my anxieties. However far I went from Europe, its fate came with me.”

“But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived.”

“Its radiant glow seemed much lighter and happier than this northern sky of eternal grey cloud.”

“Once a man has found himself, there is nothing in this world that he can lose.”

“How to remain free? How to preserve the incorruptible lucidity of my spirit faced with all the threats and dangers of sectarian turmoil?”

“dreams are like delicate little white flowers that will be blown away at the first breath of reality?”

“How to escape the tyrannical demands that the state and Church seek to impose on me? How to protect that unique part of my soul against enforced submission to rules and measures dictated from outside?”

“How to safeguard the deepest region of my spirit and its matter which belongs to me alone, my body, my health, my thoughts, my feelings, from the danger of being sacrificed to the deranged prejudices of others, to serve interests which are not my own?”

“He has the sense that up to this moment his life has been a sham; he yearns to live properly, to reflect deeply and ruminate. And it is among his books he hopes to find the solution to the eternal problem of “life and death”.”

“Her words came tumbling out in pursuit of the images hurrying through her mind.”

“intelligence, its tenets those of division, regression, hatred, violence and persecution. In”