Essays quotes

If I had lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature’s primitive laws, I assure thee I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully and quite naked.

Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject.

Therefore farewell.

Had my intention been to seek the world’s favour, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties:

I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint.

My defects are therein to be read to the life, and any imperfections and my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me.

Sic., xiv. 29.]

Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.

For Pompey could pardon the whole city of the Mamertines, though furiously incensed against it, upon the single account of the virtue and magnanimity of one citizen, Zeno,—[Plutarch calls him Stheno, and also Sthemnus and Sthenis]—who took the fault of the public wholly upon himself;

… about this affair, I should be most tempted, as the greatest satisfaction of this kind, to imitate those who in their lifetime entertain themselves with the ceremony and honours of their own obsequies beforehand, and are pleased with beholding their own dead countenance in marble.

Happy are they who can gratify their senses by insensibility, and live by their death!

”

‘Tis a common practice. And the philosopher Bion said pleasantly of the king, who by handsful pulled his hair off his head for sorrow, “

Does this man think that baldness is a remedy for grief?

”—[Cicero, Tusc. Quest., iii. 26.]—Who has not seen peevish gamesters chew and swallow the cards, and swallow the dice, in revenge for the loss of their money? Xerxes whipped the sea, and wrote a challenge to Mount Athos;

and less to their the power, even out of to make their malice die with them, but extending the life of their hatred even beyond their own. Unjust judges, who defer judgment to a time wherein they can have no knowledge of the cause!

For my part, I shall take care, if I can, that my death discover nothing that my life has not first and openly declared.

As we see some grounds that have long lain idle and untilled, when grown rich and fertile by rest, to abound with and spend their virtue in the product of innumerable sorts of weeds and wild herbs that are unprofitable, and that to make them …

wherein they manifest little regard of their own honour, irritating the party offended in their memory; and less to their the power, even out of to make their malice die with them, but extending the life of their hatred even beyond their own.

Unjust judges, who defer judgment to a time wherein they can have no knowledge of the cause!

For my part, I shall take care, if I can, that my death discover nothing that my life has not first and openly declared.

… to, and creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself.

There is not a man living whom it would so little become to speak from memory as myself, for I have scarcely any at all, and do not think that the world has another so marvellously treacherous as mine.

My other faculties are all sufficiently ordinary and mean; but in this I think myself very rare and singular, and deserving to be thought famous.

105.]—and then, again, the places which I revisit, and the books I read over again, still smile upon me with a fresh novelty.

It is not without good reason said “that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.”

I know very well that the grammarians—[Nigidius, Aulus Gellius, xi. ii; Nonius, v. 80.]— distinguish betwixt an untruth and a lie, and say that to tell an untruth is to tell a thing that is false, but that we ourselves believe to be true;

I have known many in my time very ambitious of the repute of this fine wit; but they do not see that if they have the reputation of it, the effect can no longer be.

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have other tie upon one another, but by our word.

If we did but discover the horror and gravity of it, we should pursue it with fire and sword, and more justly than other crimes.

but the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field indefinite, without bound or limit. The Pythagoreans make good to be certain and finite, and evil, infinite and uncertain.

There are a thousand ways to miss the white, there is only one to hit it.

For my own part, I have this vice in so great horror, that I am not sure I could prevail with my conscience to secure myself from the most manifest and extreme danger by an impudent and solemn lie.

An ancient father says “that a dog we know is better company than a man whose language we do not understand.”

And how much less sociable is false speaking than silence?

King Francis I. vaunted that he had by this means nonplussed Francesco Taverna, ambassador of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, a man very famous for his science in talking in those days.

accident has more title to anything that comes from me than I; occasion, company, and even the very rising and falling of my own voice, extract more from my fancy than I can find, when I sound and employ it by myself.

By which means, the things I say are better than those I write, if either were to be preferred, where neither is worth anything.

This, also, befalls me, that I do not find myself where I seek myself, and I light upon things more by chance than by any inquisition of my own judgment.

I know, experimentally, the disposition of nature so impatient of tedious and elaborate premeditation, that if it do not go frankly and gaily to work, it can perform nothing to purpose.

We say of some compositions that they stink of oil and of the lamp, by reason of a certain rough harshness that laborious handling imprints upon those where it has been employed.

But besides this, the solicitude of doing well, and a certain striving and contending of a mind too far strained and overbent upon its undertaking, breaks and hinders itself like water, that by force of its own pressing violence and abundance, cannot find a ready …

Upon the rumour of which, all the people ran to see the sight, by whom his words and science, containing the principles and means to attain to this art, were recorded, and kept for many ages.—[Cicero, De Devina, ii. 23]—A birth suitable to its progress;

I, for my part, should sooner regulate my affairs by the chance of a die than by such idle and vain dreams.

And, indeed, in all republics, a good share of the government has ever been referred to chance.

The Peripatetic sage does not exempt himself totally from perturbations of mind, but he moderates them.

There is no subject so frivolous that does not merit a place in this rhapsody.

According to our common rule of civility, it would be a notable affront to an equal, and much more to a superior, to fail being at home when he has given you notice he will come to visit you.

If, peradventure, some one may take offence at this, I can’t help it; it is much better to offend him once than myself every day, for it would be a perpetual slavery.

To what end do we avoid the servile attendance of courts, if we bring the same trouble home to our own private houses?

It is also a common rule in all assemblies, that those of less quality are to be first upon the place, by reason that it is more due to the better sort to make others wait and expect them.

… be so servilely tied to their observation that my whole life should be enslaved to ceremonies, of which there are some so troublesome that, provided a man omits them out of discretion, and not for want of breeding, it will be every whit as handsome.

I have seen some people rude, by being overcivil and troublesome in their courtesy.

Still, these excesses excepted, the knowledge of courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study. It is, like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first sight, and in the very beginning of acquaintance;

And in that part of the world where the Portuguese subdued the Indians, they found some states where it was a universal and inviolable law amongst them that every enemy overcome by the king in person, or by his lieutenant, was out of composition.

So above all both of ransom and mercy a man should take heed, if he can, of falling into the hands of a judge who is an enemy and victorious.

I once heard of a prince, and a great captain, having a narration given him as he sat at table of the proceeding against Monsieur de Vervins, who was sentenced to death for having surrendered Boulogne to the English, —[To Henry VIII.

56.]

The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, that passion alone, in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents.

What affliction could be greater or more just than that of Pompey’s friends, who, in his ship, were spectators of that horrible murder?

Such as are in immediate fear of a losing their estates, of banishment, or of slavery, live in perpetual anguish, and lose all appetite and repose; whereas such as are actually poor, slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk.

And the many people who, impatient of the perpetual alarms of fear, have hanged or drowned themselves, or dashed themselves to pieces, give us sufficiently to understand that fear is more importunate and insupportable than death itself.

The Greeks acknowledged another kind of fear, differing from any we have spoken of yet, that surprises us without any visible cause, by an impulse from heaven, so that whole nations and whole armies have been struck with it.

He arrived, without completing his course, at the place to which his ambition aimed, with greater glory than he could either have hoped or desired, anticipating by his fall the name and power to which he aspired in perfecting his career.

In the judgment I make of another man’s life, I always observe how he carried himself at his death; and the principal concern I have for my own is that I may die well—that is, patiently and tranquilly.

Cicero says—[Tusc., i. 31.]—“that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.”

—there is more in them of opposition and obstinacy than is consistent with so sacred a profession; but whatsoever personage a man takes upon himself to perform, he ever mixes his own part with it.

Let the philosophers say what they will, the thing at which we all aim, even in virtue is pleasure.

It amuses me to rattle in ears this word, which they so nauseate to and if it signify some supreme pleasure and contentment, it is more due to the assistance of virtue than to any other assistance whatever.

For what human means will ever attain its enjoyment? The most perfect have been fain to content themselves to aspire unto it, and to approach it only, without ever possessing it.

But they are deceived, seeing that of all the pleasures we know, the very pursuit is pleasant.

The attempt ever relishes of the quality of the thing to which it is directed, for it is a good part of, and consubstantial with, the effect.

no one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think he has yet twenty good years to come.

Fool that thou art! who has assured unto thee the term of life?

Thou dependest upon physicians’ tales: rather consult effects and experience. According to the common course of things, ‘tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life.

—let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course.

Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death.

Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape;

The Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room to serve for a memento to their guests:

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.

There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.

In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to purpose.

I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative;

and there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age:

for never man was so distrustful of his life, never man so uncertain as to its duration. Neither health, which I have hitherto ever enjoyed very strong and vigorous, and very seldom interrupted, does prolong, nor sickness contract my hopes.

Every minute, methinks, I am escaping, and it eternally runs in my mind, that what may be done to-morrow, may be done to-day.

Hazards and dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our end;

… us, we shall find that the sound and the sick, those that are abroad at sea, and those that sit by the fire, those who are engaged in battle, and those who sit idle at home, are the one as near it as the other.

For anything I have to do before I die, the longest leisure would appear too short, were it but an hour’s business I had to do.

A friend of mine the other day turning over my tablets, found therein a memorandum of something I would have done after my decease, whereupon I told him, as it was really true, that though I was no more than a league’s distance only from …

… over my own thoughts, and confine them to my own particular concerns, I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with him I did not expect long before.

We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go

, and, above all things, take care, at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self:—

Let us, therefore, as many of us as can, get this advantage; ‘tis the true and sovereign liberty here on earth, that fortifies us wherewithal to defy violence and injustice, and to contemn prisons and chains:

Our very religion itself has no surer human foundation than the contempt of life.

Not only the argument of reason invites us to it—for why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented?

Death is the beginning of another life. So did we weep, and so much it cost us to enter into this, and so did we put off our former veil in entering into it.

Nothing can be a grievance that is but once.

Is it reasonable so long to fear a thing that will so soon be despatched? Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

Nothing can be a grievance that is but once. Is it reasonable so long to fear a thing that will so soon be despatched?

Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

Aristotle tells us that there are certain little beasts upon the banks of the river Hypanis, that never live above a day:

And what matters it, when it shall happen, since it is inevitable? To him that told Socrates, “The thirty tyrants have sentenced thee to death”; “And nature them,” said he.—[Socrates was not condemned to death by the thirty tyrants, but by the Athenians.-Diogenes Laertius, ii.35.]—

What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble!

As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included.

As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included.

And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.

Death is the beginning of another life. So did we weep, and so much it cost us to enter into this, and so did we put off our former veil in entering into it. Nothing can be a grievance that is but once.

“All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the expense of life itself.

The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.

You are in death, whilst you are in life, because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while you live;

“

Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil as you make it.

’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade;

“Give place to others, as others have given place to you.

Equality is the soul of equity.

Who can complain of being comprehended in the same destiny, wherein all are involved? Besides, live as long as you can, you shall by that nothing shorten the space you are to be dead; ‘tis all to no purpose;

“

Death is less to be feared than nothing, if there could be anything less than nothing.

“Neither can it any way concern you, whether you are living or dead: living, by reason that you are still in being; dead, because you are no more. Moreover, no one dies before his hour:

Wherever your life ends, it is all there.

The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.

Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.

Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contributes no more to thy dissolution, than every one of the rest: the last step is not the cause of lassitude: it does not confess it.

Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it.

” These are the good lessons our mother Nature teaches.

the visor must be removed as well from things as from persons, that being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath but the very same death that a mean servant or a poor chambermaid died a day or two ago, without any manner of apprehension.

Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.

I am one of those who are most sensible of the power of imagination: every one is jostled by it, but some are overthrown by it. It has a very piercing impression upon me;

Happy is the death that deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.

I am one of those who are most sensible of the power of imagination: every one is jostled by it, but some are overthrown by it.

It has a very piercing impression upon me; and I make it my business to avoid, wanting force to resist it. I could live by the sole help of healthful and jolly company:

… country-woman who, having accustomed herself to play with and carry a young calf in her arms, and daily continuing to do so as it grew up, obtained this by custom, that, when grown to be a great ox, she was still able to bear it.

For, in truth, custom is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress.

She, by little and little, slily and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no …

Plato—[Diogenes Laertius, iii. 38. But he whom Plato censured was not a boy playing at nuts, but a man throwing dice.]—reprehending a boy for playing at nuts, “Thou reprovest me,” says the boy, “for a very little thing.”

“Custom,” replied Plato, “is no little thing.”

I find that our greatest vices derive their first propensity from our most tender infancy, and that our principal education depends upon the nurse.

Miracles appear to be so, according to our ignorance of nature, and not according to the essence of nature the continually being accustomed to anything, blinds the eye of our judgment.

Barbarians are no more a wonder to us, than we are to them;

nor with any more reason, as every one would confess, if after having travelled over those remote examples, men could settle themselves to reflect upon, and rightly to confer them, with their own.

but having also tried to persuade the Indians to leave their custom, and, after the Greek manner, to burn the bodies of their fathers, they conceived a still greater horror at the motion.—[Herodotus, iii. 38.]—

Every one does the same, for use veils from us the true aspect of things.

Taking upon me once to justify something in use amongst us, and that was received with absolute authority for a great many leagues round about us, and not content, as men commonly do, to establish it only by force of law and example, but inquiring …

but one may say, with colour enough, that it has accidentally produced and begotten the mischiefs and ruin that have since happened, both without and against it; it, principally, we are to accuse for these disorders:

They who give the first shock to a state, are almost naturally the first overwhelmed in its ruin

the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first motor; he beats and disturbs the water for another’s net.

… hate and fear it, telling them who importune me to take physic, that at all events they must give me time to recover my strength and health, that I may be the better able to support and encounter the violence and danger of their potions.

I let nature work, supposing her to be sufficiently armed with teeth and claws to defend herself from the assaults of infirmity,

and to uphold that contexture, the dissolution of which she flies and abhors. I am afraid, lest, instead of assisting her when close grappled and struggling with disease, I should assist her adversary, and burden her still more with work to do.

Men are apt presently to inquire, does such a one understand Greek or Latin? Is he a poet? or does he write in prose? But whether he be grown better or more discreet, which are qualities of principal concern, these are never thought of.

We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned.

We only labour to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void. Like birds who fly abroad to forage for grain, and bring it home in the beak, without tasting it themselves, to feed their young;

Is he a poet? or does he write in prose? But whether he be grown better or more discreet, which are qualities of principal concern, these are never thought of. We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned.

We only labour to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

Like birds who fly abroad to forage for grain, and bring it home in the beak, without tasting it themselves, to feed their young;

And what loss would this be, if they neither instruct us to think well nor to do well?

All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of goodness.

But the reason I glanced upon but now, may it not also hence proceed, that, our studies in France having almost no other aim but profit, except as to those who, by nature born to offices and employments rather of glory than gain, addict themselves …

I have no other end in this writing, but only to discover myself, who, also shall, peradventure, be another thing to-morrow, if I chance to meet any new instruction to change me.

I have no authority to be believed, neither do I desire it, being too conscious of my own inerudition to be able to instruct others.

Some one, then, having seen the preceding chapter, the other day told me at my house, that I should a little farther have extended my discourse on the education of children.—[“Which, how fit I am to do, let my friends flatter me if they please, …

… make him put what he has learned into a hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own, taking instruction of his progress by the pedagogic institutions of Plato.

‘Tis a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed;

the stomach has not performed its office unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it to concoct.

for, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own.

Who follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after nothing.

Let him, at least, know that he knows. It will be necessary that he imbibe their knowledge, not that he be corrupted with their precepts;

Our masters stick them, full feathered, in our memories, and there establish them like oracles, of which the letters and syllables are of the substance of the thing.

To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory.

That which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book.

It will be necessary that he imbibe their knowledge, not that he be corrupted with their precepts; and no matter if he forget where he had his learning, provided he know how to apply it to his own use.

Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after:

‘tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both he and I equally see and understand them.

Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after: ‘tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both he and I equally see and understand them.

Bees cull their several sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find them, but themselves afterwards make the honey, which is all and purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram:

so the several fragments he borrows from others, he will transform and shuffle together to compile a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment: his instruction, labour and study, tend to nothing else but to form that.

‘Tis to our prejudice that men of understanding should so immoderately affect brevity; no doubt their reputation is the better by it, but in the meantime we are the worse.

Plutarch had rather we should applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge, and had rather leave us with an appetite to read more, than glutted with that we have already read.

He knew very well, that a man may say too much even upon the best subjects, and that Alexandridas justly reproached him who made very good. but too long speeches to the Ephori, when he said: “O stranger!

but too long speeches to the Ephori, when he said: “O stranger! thou speakest the things thou shouldst speak, but not as thou shouldst speak them.”—[Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedamonians.]—

Such as have lean and spare bodies stuff themselves out with clothes; so they who are defective in matter endeavour to make amends with words.

Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.

“O stranger! thou speakest the things thou shouldst speak, but not as thou shouldst speak them.”—[Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedamonians.]—Such as have lean and spare bodies stuff themselves out with clothes; so they who are defective in matter endeavour to make amends with words.

Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.

One asking Socrates of what country he was, he did not make answer, of Athens, but of the world;—[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 37; Plutarch, On Exile, c.

Quaes., v. 37; Plutarch, On Exile, c. 4.]— he whose imagination was fuller and wider, embraced the whole world for his country, and extended his society and friendship to all mankind; not as we do, who look no further than our feet.

When the vines of my village are nipped with the frost, my parish priest presently concludes, that the indignation of God has gone out against all the human race, and that the cannibals have already got the pip.

Who is it that, seeing the havoc of these civil wars of ours, does not cry out, that the machine of the world is near dissolution, and that the day of judgment is at hand;

… to make her tranquillity and satisfaction shine so as to appear without, and her contentment ought to fashion the outward behaviour to her own mould, and consequently to fortify it with a graceful confidence, an active and joyous carriage, and a serene and contented countenance.

The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness;

her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene. ‘Tis Baroco and Baralipton—[Two terms of the ancient scholastic logic.]—that render their disciples so dirty and ill-favoured, and not she;

Since philosophy is that which instructs us to live, and that infancy has there its lessons as well as other ages, why is it not communicated to children betimes?

They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living.

A hundred students have got the pox before they have come to read Aristotle’s lecture on temperance. Cicero said, that though he should live two men’s ages, he should never find leisure to study the lyric poets;

I would have his outward fashion and mien, and the disposition of his limbs, formed at the same time with his mind.

‘Tis not a soul, ‘tis not a body that we are training up, but a man, and we ought not to divide him.

And, as Plato says, we are not to fashion one without the other, but make them draw together like two horses harnessed to a coach.

But amongst other things, the strict government of most of our colleges has evermore displeased me; peradventure, they might have erred less perniciously on the indulgent side. ‘Tis a real house of correction of imprisoned youth.

They are made debauched by being punished before they are so.

Do but come in when they are about their lesson, and you shall hear nothing but the outcries of boys under execution, with the thundering noise of their pedagogues drunk with fury.

They are made debauched by being punished before they are so. Do but come in when they are about their lesson, and you shall hear nothing but the outcries of boys under execution, with the thundering noise of their pedagogues drunk with fury.

A very pretty way this, to tempt these tender and timorous souls to love their book, with a furious countenance, and a rod in hand!

A cursed and pernicious way of proceeding! Besides what Quintilian has very well observed, that this imperious authority is often attended by very dangerous consequences, and particularly our way of chastising.

A cursed and pernicious way of proceeding! Besides what Quintilian has very well observed, that this imperious authority is often attended by very dangerous consequences, and particularly our way of chastising.

How much more decent would it be to see their classes strewed with green leaves and fine flowers, than with the bloody stumps of birch and willows?

Were it left to my ordering. I should paint the school with the pictures of joy and gladness; Flora and the Graces, as the philosopher Speusippus did his. Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too.

that is, where he shall do it out of complacency to the customs of the place.

Let him be able to do everything, but love to do nothing but what is good.

The philosophers themselves do not justify Callisthenes for forfeiting the favour of his master Alexander the Great, by refusing to pledge him a cup of wine. Let him laugh, play, wench with his prince:

if there be constancy in his sickness; if there be modesty in his mirth, temperance in his pleasures, order in his domestic economy, indifference in palate, whether what he eats or drinks be flesh or fish, wine or water:

The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.

Zeuxidamus, to one who asked him, why the Lacedaemonians did not commit their constitutions of chivalry to writing, and deliver them to their young men to read, made answer, that it was because they would inure them to action, and not amuse them with words.

With such a one, after fifteen or sixteen years’ study, compare one of our college Latinists, who has thrown away so much time in nothing but learning to speak.

The world is nothing but babble; and I hardly ever yet saw that man who did not rather prate too much, than speak too little.

And yet half of our age is embezzled this way: we are kept four or five years to learn words only, and to tack them together into clauses; as many more to form them into a long discourse, divided into four or five parts;

of these, the first, a pert affected fellow, offered his service in a long premeditated discourse upon the subject of the work in hand, and by his oratory inclined the voices of the people in his favour; but the other in three words:

“O Athenians, what this man says, I will do.”

—[Plutarch, Instructions to Statesmen, c. 4.]— When Cicero was in the height and heat of an eloquent harangue, many were struck with admiration; but Cato only laughed, saying, “We have a pleasant (mirth-making) consul.”

the very pieces will be fine by themselves. Menander’s answer had this meaning, who being reproved by a friend, the time drawing on at which he had promised a comedy, that he had not yet fallen in hand with it;

“It is made, and ready,” said he, “all but the verses.”

—[Plutarch, Whether the Athenians more excelled in Arms or in Letters.]—Having contrived the subject, and disposed the scenes in his fancy, he took little care for the rest.

for which reason, an easy and natural negligence does well. I no more like a web where the knots and seams are to be seen, than a fine figure, so delicate, that a man may tell all the bones and veins:

That eloquence prejudices the subject it would advance, that wholly attracts us to itself.

And as in our outward habit, ‘tis a ridiculous effeminacy to distinguish ourselves by a particular and unusual garb or fashion; so in language, to study new phrases, and to affect words that are not of current use, proceeds from a puerile and scholastic ambition.

The generality of readers, for having found a like robe, very mistakingly imagine they have the same body and inside too, whereas force and sinews are never to be borrowed; the gloss, and outward ornament, that is, words and elocution, may.

Most of those I converse with, speak the same language I here write; but whether they think the same thoughts I cannot say.

The Athenians, says Plato, study fulness and elegancy of speaking; the Lacedaemonians affect brevity, and those of Crete to aim more at the fecundity of conception than the fertility of speech; and these are the best.

For the chief things my father expected from their endeavours to whom he had delivered me for education, were affability and good-humour; and, to say the truth, my manners had no other vice but sloth and want of metal.

The fear was not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing; nobody prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless;

they foresaw idleness, but no malice; and I find it falls out accordingly: The complaints I hear of myself are these: “He is idle, cold in the offices of friendship and relation, and in those of the public, too particular, too disdainful.”

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge, we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.

The novelty, rather than the greatness of things, tempts us to inquire into their causes.

We are to judge with more reverence, and with greater acknowledgment of our own ignorance and infirmity, of the infinite power of nature.

Shall it be of ignorance, simplicity, and facility; or of malice and imposture? Is any man now living so impudent as to think himself comparable to them in virtue, piety, learning, judgment, or any kind of perfection?

‘Tis a presumption of great danger and consequence, besides the absurd temerity it draws after it, to contemn what we do not comprehend.

For after, according to your fine understanding, you have established the limits of truth and error, and that, afterwards, there appears a necessity upon you of believing stranger things than those you have contradicted, you are already obliged to quit your limits.

Why do we not consider what contradictions we find in our own judgments; how many things were yesterday articles of our faith, that to-day appear no other than fables?

Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything doubtful and undecided.

Having considered the proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had a mind to imitate his way.

But in the friendship I speak of, they mix and work themselves into one piece, with so universal a mixture, that there is no more sign of the seam by which they were first conjoined.

If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.

There is, beyond all that I am able to say, I know not what inexplicable and fated power that brought on this union.

I have only led a languishing life; and the very pleasures that present themselves to me, instead of administering anything of consolation, double my affliction for his loss.

We were halves throughout, and to that degree, that methinks, by outliving him, I defraud him of his part.

I was so grown and accustomed to be always his double in all places and in all things, that methinks I am no more than half of myself:

he had a mind fashioned to the model of better ages. Now, in exchange of this serious piece, I will present you with another of a more gay and frolic air, from the same hand, and written at the same age.”

As if we had an infectious touch, we, by our manner of handling, corrupt things that in themselves are laudable and good: we may grasp virtue so that it becomes vicious, if we embrace it too stringently and with too violent a desire.

Those who say, there is never any excess in virtue, forasmuch as it is not virtue when it once becomes excess, only play upon words:

prejudice the opinion men had of his devotion, by pretending to be devout beyond all examples of others of his condition.

I love temperate and moderate natures. An immoderate zeal, even to that which is good, even though it does not offend, astonishes me, and puts me to study what name to give it.

Neither the mother of Pausanias,

and I should neither advise nor like to follow so savage a virtue, and that costs so dear.

The archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short, and ‘tis equally troublesome to my sight, to look up at a great light, and to look down into a dark abyss.

Callicles in Plato says, that the extremity of philosophy is hurtful, and advises not to dive into it beyond the limits of profit; that, taken moderately, it is pleasant and useful;

This discovery of so vast a country seems to be of very great consideration. I cannot be sure, that hereafter there may not be another, so many wiser men than we having been deceived in this.

I am afraid our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we have more curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but catch nothing but wind.

Plato brings in Solon,—[In Timaeus.]—telling a story that he had heard from the priests of Sais in Egypt, that of old, and before the Deluge, there was a great island called Atlantis, situate directly at the mouth of the straits of Gibraltar, which contained more …

a vice from which great inconveniences derive their original.

Now, to return to my subject, I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.

As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live:

yet in other places, where she shines in her own purity and proper lustre, she marvellously baffles and disgraces all our vain and frivolous attempts:

Our utmost endeavours cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.

All things, says Plato,—[Laws, 10.]—are produced either by nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by the one or the other of the former, the least and the most imperfect by the last.

… neighbours, and who were much greater masters in all sorts of mischief than they) did not exercise this sort of revenge without a meaning, and that it must needs be more painful than theirs, they began to leave their old way, and to follow this.

I am not sorry that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of so cruel an action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own.

I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees;

or to give it inwardly for the health of the patient. But there never was any opinion so irregular, as to excuse treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, and cruelty, which are our familiar vices.

We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules of reason: but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity exceed them.

Their wars are throughout noble and generous, and carry as much excuse and fair pretence, as that human malady is capable of; having with them no other foundation than the sole jealousy of valour.

‘tis a turn of fortune to make our enemy stumble, or to dazzle him with the light of the sun; ‘tis a trick of science and art, and that may happen in a mean base fellow, to be a good fencer.

The estimate and value of a man consist in the heart and in the will: there his true honour lies.

Valour is stability, not of legs and arms, but of the courage and the soul; it does not lie in the goodness of our horse or our arms but in our own. He that falls obstinate in his courage—

who, dying, yet darts at his enemy a fierce and disdainful look, is overcome not by us, but by fortune; he is killed, not conquered; the most valiant are sometimes the most unfortunate.

There are defeats more triumphant than victories.

Never could those four sister victories, the fairest the sun ever be held, of Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, and Sicily, venture to oppose all their united glories, to the single glory of the discomfiture of King Leonidas and his men, at the pass of Thermopylae.

Some one asked a beggar, whom he saw in his shirt in the depth of winter, as brisk and frolic as he who goes muffled up to the ears in furs, how he was able to endure to go so?

“Why, sir,” he answered, “you go with your face bare: I am all face.”

The Italians have a story of the Duke of Florence’s fool, whom his master asking how, being so thinly clad, he was able to support the cold, when he himself, warmly wrapped up as he was, was hardly able to do it?

I very much desire that we may be judged every man by himself, and would not be drawn into the consequence of common examples. My own weakness nothing alters the esteem I ought to have for the force and vigour of those who deserve it:

Crawling upon the slime of the earth, I do not for all that cease to observe up in the clouds the inimitable height of some heroic souls.

‘Tis a great deal for me to have my judgment regular and just, if the effects cannot be so, and to maintain this sovereign part, at least, free from corruption; ‘tis something to have my will right and good where my legs fail me.

Crawling upon the slime of the earth, I do not for all that cease to observe up in the clouds the inimitable height of some heroic souls.

‘Tis a great deal for me to have my judgment regular and just, if the effects cannot be so, and to maintain this sovereign part, at least, free from corruption; ‘tis something to have my will right and good where my legs fail me.

This age wherein we live, in our part of the world at least, is grown so stupid, that not only the exercise, but the very imagination of virtue is defective, and seems to be no other but college jargon:

a mighty subtlety indeed!

Give me the greatest and most unblemished action that ever the day beheld, and I will contrive a hundred plausible drifts and ends to obscure it.

God knows, whoever will stretch them out to the full, what diversity of images our internal wills suffer under. They do not so maliciously play the censurers, as they do it ignorantly and rudely in all their detractions.

coming to the last, the first by some space’ (but a space that he will swear is not to be filled up by any human wit), he will be astounded, he will not know where he is.

And here is a wonder: we have far more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry; it is easier to write it than to understand it.

There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is above all rules and reason.

for I instantly turn the leaf. When I call him calf and coxcomb, I do not pretend to entail those titles upon him for ever; neither do I think I give myself the lie in calling him an honest fellow presently after.

No one quality engrosses us purely and universally.

Were it not the sign of a fool to talk to one’s self, there would hardly be a day or hour wherein I might not be heard to grumble and mutter to myself and against myself, “Confound the fool!”

and yet I do not think that to be my definition.

Who for seeing me one while cold and presently very fond towards my wife, believes the one or the other to be counterfeited, is an ass.

Nero, taking leave of his mother whom he was sending to be drowned, was nevertheless sensible of some emotion at this farewell, and was struck with horror and pity.

‘Tis said, that the light of the sun is not one continuous thing, but that he darts new rays so thick one upon another that we cannot perceive the intermission:

Just so the soul variously and imperceptibly darts out her passions.

Artabanus coming by surprise once upon his nephew Xerxes, chid him for the sudden alteration of his countenance. He was considering the immeasurable greatness of his forces passing over the Hellespont for the Grecian expedition:

The corrupt ways by which in this our time they arrive at the height to which their ambitions aspire, manifestly enough declares that their ends cannot be very good.

Let us tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society? What does she so much seek as elbowroom?

A man many do well or ill everywhere; but if what Bias says be true, that the greatest part is the worse part, or what the Preacher says: there is not one good of a thousand:

but if it be referred to him, he will choose to be alone. He cannot think himself sufficiently rid of vice, if he must yet contend with it in other men. Charondas punished those as evil men who were convicted of keeping ill company.

There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man, the one by his vice, the other by his nature.

And Antisthenes, in my opinion, did not give him a satisfactory answer, who reproached him with frequenting ill company, by saying that the physicians lived well enough amongst the sick, for if they contribute to the health of the sick, no doubt but by the …

they often follow us even to cloisters and philosophical schools; nor deserts, nor caves, hair-shirts, nor fasts, can disengage us from them:

One telling Socrates that such a one was nothing improved by his travels: “I very well believe it,” said he, “for he took himself along with him”

If a man do not first discharge both himself and his mind of the burden with which he finds himself oppressed, motion will but make it press the harder and sit the heavier, as the lading of a ship is of less encumbrance when fast …

Therefore, it is not enough to get remote from the public; ‘tis not enough to shift the soil only; a man must flee from the popular conditions that have taken possession of his soul, he must sequester and come again to himself:

We still carry our fetters along with us.

‘Tis not an absolute liberty; we yet cast back a look upon what we have left behind us; the fancy is still full of it:

We still carry our fetters along with us. ‘Tis not an absolute liberty; we yet cast back a look upon what we have left behind us; the fancy is still full of it:

Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself;

and therefore is to be called home and confined within itself: that is the true solitude, and that may be enjoyed even in populous cities and the courts of kings, though more commodiously apart.

We have a mind pliable in itself, that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity.

Virtue is satisfied with herself, without discipline, without words, without effects.

In our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand that concerns ourselves. He that thou seest scrambling up the ruins of that wall, furious and transported, against whom so many harquebuss-shots are levelled;

No such matter; he will there end his days, but he will teach posterity the measure of Plautus’ verses and the true orthography of a Latin word.

Who is it that does not voluntarily exchange his health, his repose, and his very life for reputation and glory, the most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes current amongst us?

Our own death does not sufficiently terrify and trouble us; let us, moreover, charge ourselves with those of our wives, children, and family: our own affairs do not afford us anxiety enough;

Solitude seems to me to wear the best favour in such as have already employed their most active and flourishing age in the world’s service, after the example of Thales.

We have lived enough for others; let us at least live out the small remnant of life for ourselves; let us now call in our thoughts and intentions to ourselves, and to our own ease and repose.

‘Tis no light thing to make a sure retreat; it will be enough for us to do without mixing other enterprises.

that is to say, let the remainder be our own, but not so joined and so close as not to be forced away without flaying us or tearing out part of our whole.

The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own.

‘Tis time to wean ourselves from society when we can no longer add anything to it; he who is not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow. Our forces begin to fail us;

Now, as to the end that Pliny and Cicero propose to us of glory, ‘tis infinitely wide of my account.

Ambition is of all others the most contrary humour to solitude; glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place.

For so much as I understand, these have only their arms and legs disengaged from the crowd; their soul and intention remain confined behind more than ever:

‘Tis an unworthy ambition to think to derive glory from a man’s sloth and privacy: you are to do like the beasts of chase, who efface the track at the entrance into their den.

You are no more to concern yourself how the world talks of you, but how you are to talk to yourself.

Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself. A man may miscarry alone as well as in company.

you are to do like the beasts of chase, who efface the track at the entrance into their den. You are no more to concern yourself how the world talks of you, but how you are to talk to yourself.

Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself.

A man may miscarry alone as well as in company. Till you have rendered yourself one before whom you dare not trip, and till you have a bashfulness and respect for yourself,

Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself.

A man may miscarry alone as well as in company.

Till you have rendered yourself one before whom you dare not trip, and till you have a bashfulness and respect for yourself,

… that to appear so excellent in these less necessary qualities is to produce witness against a man’s self, that he has spent his time and applied his study ill, which ought to have been employed in the acquisition of more necessary and more useful things.

So that Philip, king of Macedon, having heard that great Alexander his son sing once at a feast to the wonder of the best musicians there: “Art thou not ashamed,” said he to him, “to sing so well?”

And to the same Philip a musician, with whom he was disputing about some things concerning his art: “Heaven forbid, sir,” said he, “that so great a misfortune should ever befall you as to understand these things better than I.”

… besides what I apply them to, the seed of a more rich and a bolder matter, and sometimes, collaterally, a more delicate sound both to myself who will say no more about it in this place, and to others who shall be of my humour.

But returning to the speaking virtue: I find no great choice betwixt not knowing to speak anything but ill, and not knowing to speak anything but well.

The sages tell us that, as to what concerns knowledge, ‘tis nothing but philosophy; and as to what concerns effects, nothing but virtue, which is generally proper to all degrees and to all orders.

… but a fine jingle of well-chosen words and delicate couched phrases, but rather replete and abounding with grand discourses of reason, by which a man may render himself not more eloquent, but more wise, and that instruct us not to speak, but to do well.

Away with that eloquence that enchants us with itself, and not with actual things!

unless you will allow that of Cicero to be of so supreme a perfection as to form a complete body of itself.

for I can find none able to follow me: and I never transcribe any. I have accustomed the great ones who know me to endure my blots and dashes, and upon paper without fold or margin.

Those that cost me the most pains, are the worst; when I once begin to draw it in by head and shoulders, ‘tis a sign that I am not there.

I fall too without premeditation or design; the first word begets the second, and so to the end of the chapter. The letters of this age consist more in fine edges and prefaces than in matter.

when I once begin to draw it in by head and shoulders, ‘tis a sign that I am not there. I fall too without premeditation or design; the first word begets the second, and so to the end of the chapter.

The letters of this age consist more in fine edges and prefaces than in matter.

Just as I had rather write two letters than close and fold up one, and always assign that employment to some other, so, when the real business of my letter is dispatched, I would with all my heart transfer it to another hand to add …

One that they were leading to the gallows told them they must not take him through such a street, lest a merchant who lived there should arrest him by the way for an old debt.

Another told the hangman he must not touch his neck for fear of making him laugh, he was so ticklish.

Another answered his confessor, who promised him he should that day sup with our Lord, “Do you go then,” said he, “in my room [place]; for I for my part keep fast to-day.”

insomuch that Brutus had much difficulty in saving a very small number.—[“Only fifty were saved.”—Plutarch, Life of Brutus, c. 8.]

Every opinion is of force enough to cause itself to be espoused at the expense of life.

The first article of that valiant oath that Greece took and observed in the Median war, was that every one should sooner exchange life for death, than their own laws for those of Persia.

Shall we persuade our skins that the jerks of a whip agreeably tickle us, or our taste that a potion of aloes is vin de Graves?

Pyrrho’s hog is here in the same predicament with us; he is not afraid of death, ‘tis true, but if you beat him he will cry out to some purpose.

Shall we force the general law of nature, which in every living creature under heaven is seen to tremble under pain? The very trees seem to groan under the blows they receive.

Besides, this ought to be our comfort, that naturally, if the pain be violent, ‘tis but short; and if long, nothing violent:

Thou wilt not feel it long if thou feelest it too much; it will either put an end to itself or to thee; it comes to the same thing; if thou canst not support it, it will export thee:

That which makes us suffer pain with so much impatience is the not being accustomed to repose our chiefest contentment in the soul; that we do not enough rely upon her who is the sole and sovereign mistress of our condition.

Plato fears our too vehemently engaging ourselves with pain and pleasure, forasmuch as these too much knit and ally the soul to the body; whereas I rather, quite contrary, by reason it too much separates and disunites them.

As an enemy is made more fierce by our flight, so pain grows proud to see us truckle under her.

She will surrender upon much better terms to them who make head against her: a man must oppose and stoutly set himself against her. In retiring and giving ground, we invite and pull upon ourselves the ruin that threatens us.

and have despised some, when they have befallen me, to which the world has given so terrible a figure that I should blush to boast of my constancy:

Opinion is a powerful party, bold, and without measure.

Who ever so greedily hunted after security and repose as Alexander and Caesar did after disturbance and difficulties? Teres, the father of Sitalces, was wont to say that “when he had no wars, he fancied there was no difference betwixt him and his groom.”

… bed, and his hours of leisure from affairs he continually spent in study upon his knees, having a little bread and a glass of water set by his book, which was all the provision of his repast, and all the time he spent in eating.

I know some who consentingly have acquired both profit and advancement from cuckoldom, of which the bare name only affrights so many people.

If the sight be not the most necessary of all our senses, ‘tis at least the most pleasant; but the most pleasant and most useful of all our members seem to be those of generation;

the price gives value to the diamond; difficulty to virtue; suffering to devotion; and griping to physic. A certain person, to be poor, threw his crowns into the same sea to which so many come, in all parts of the world, to fish for riches.

Epicurus says that to be rich is no relief, but only an alteration, of affairs.

In truth, it is not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice. I will deliver my own experience concerning this affair.

A certain person, to be poor, threw his crowns into the same sea to which so many come, in all parts of the world, to fish for riches. Epicurus says that to be rich is no relief, but only an alteration, of affairs.

In truth, it is not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice.

I will deliver my own experience concerning this affair.

If I chanced to leave my cash-box behind me, O, what strange suspicions and anxiety of mind did I enter into, and, which was worse, without daring to acquaint anybody with it.

My mind was eternally taken up with such things as these, so that, all things considered, there is more trouble in keeping money than in getting it.

And if I did not altogether so much as I say, or was not really so scandalously solicitous of my money as I have made myself out to be, yet it cost me something at least to restrain myself from being so.

I live from hand to mouth, and content myself in having sufficient for my present and ordinary expense; for as to extraordinary occasions, all the laying up in the world would never suffice.

And ‘tis the greatest folly imaginable to expect that fortune should ever sufficiently arm us against herself; ‘tis with our own arms that we are to fight her; accidental ones will betray us in the pinch of the business.

If I lay up, ‘tis for some near and contemplated purpose; not to purchase lands, of which I have no need, but to purchase pleasure:

Plenty, then, and indigence depend upon the opinion every one has of them; and riches no more than glory or health have other beauty or pleasure than he lends them by whom they are possessed.

Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he so finds himself; not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in this alone belief gives itself being and reality.

Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.

Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he so finds himself; not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in this alone belief gives itself being and reality.

Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.

All external accessions receive taste and colour from the internal constitution, as clothes warm us, not with their heat, but our own, which they are fit to cover and nourish;

for they constrain her to go back to her unanswerable replies: “If it be ill to live in necessity, at least there is no necessity upon a man to live in necessity”: “No man continues ill long but by his own fault.”

He who has neither the courage to die nor the heart to live, who will neither resist nor fly, what can we do with him?

Of all the follies of the world, that which is most universally received is the solicitude of reputation and glory;

He then discovers nothing to you but such parts as are not in the least his own, and conceals those by which alone one may rightly judge of his value.

‘Tis the price of the blade that you inquire into, not of the scabbard: you would not peradventure bid a farthing for him, if you saw him stripped.

You are to judge him by himself and not by what he wears; and, as one of the ancients very pleasantly said: “Do you know why you repute him tall? You reckon withal the height of his pattens.”—[Seneca, Ep.

You are to judge him by himself and not by what he wears; and, as one of the ancients very pleasantly said: “Do you know why you repute him tall? You reckon withal the height of his pattens.”—[Seneca, Ep. 76.]—

The pedestal is no part of the statue.

Measure him without his stilts; let him lay aside his revenues and his titles; let him present himself in his shirt. Then examine if his body be sound and sprightly, active and disposed to perform its functions. What soul has he?

This is not of the complexion of that which Homer makes to issue from the wounded gods.” The poet Hermodorus had written a poem in honour of Antigonus, wherein he called him the son of the sun:

“He who has the emptying of my close-stool,” said Antigonus, “knows to the contrary.”

He is but a man at best, and if he be deformed or ill-qualified from his birth, the empire of the universe cannot set him to rights:

Whatever the benefits of fortune are, they yet require a palate to relish them.

‘Tis fruition, and not possession, that renders us happy:

He is a sot, his taste is palled and flat; he no more enjoys what he has than one that has a cold relishes the flavour of canary, or than a horse is sensible of his rich caparison.

considering that the least prick with a pin, or the least passion of the soul, is sufficient to deprive one of the pleasure of being sole monarch of the world.

At the first twitch of the gout it signifies much to be called Sir and Your Majesty!

does he not forget his palaces and girandeurs? If he be angry, can his being a prince keep him from looking red and looking pale, and grinding his teeth like a madman?

And that this is so, we see that princes divert themselves sometimes in disguising their quality, awhile to depose themselves, and to stoop to the poor and ordinary way of living of the meanest of their people.

Nothing is so distasteful and clogging as abundance.

What appetite would not be baffled to see three hundred women at its mercy, as the grand signor has in his seraglio? And, of his ancestors what fruition or taste of sport did he reserve to himself, who never went hawking without seven thousand falconers?

Can I form any assurance of his real respect to me, from his humble way of speaking and submissive behaviour, when these are ceremonies it is not in his choice to deny?

The honour we receive from those that fear us is not honour; those respects are due to royalty and not to me:

Do I not see that the wicked and the good king, he that is hated and he that is beloved, have the one as much reverence paid him as the other?

or rather my fortune, than me, to increase their own. All they say to me or do for me is but outward paint, appearance, their liberty being on all parts restrained by the great power and authority I have over them.

I see nothing about me but what is dissembled and disguised.

The Emperor Julian being one day applauded by his courtiers for his exact justice: “I should be proud of these praises,” said he, “did they come from persons that durst condemn or disapprove the contrary, in case I should do it.”

and some time after the necessity of public affairs requiring that he should reassume his charge, he made answer to those who came to court him to it:

“You would not offer,” said he, “to persuade me to this, had you seen the fine order of the trees I have planted in my orchard, and the fair melons I have sown in my garden.”

In Anacharsis’ opinion, the happiest state of government would be where, all other things being equal, precedence should be measured out by the virtues, and repulses by the vices of men.

shifting from this to that, hunting after novelties, and applauding the inventors; by which means manners are corrupted and the old institutions come to be nauseated and despised.

In all things, saving only in those that are evil, a change is to be feared; even the change of seasons, winds, viands, and humours.

And no laws are in their true credit, but such to which God has given so long a continuance that no one knows their beginning, or that there ever was any other.

even the change of seasons, winds, viands, and humours. And no laws are in their true credit, but such to which God has given so long a continuance that no one knows their beginning, or that there ever was any other.

Reason directs that we should always go the same way, but not always at the same pace.

And, consequently, though a wise man ought not so much to give the reins to human passions as to let him deviate from the right path, he may, notwithstanding, without prejudice to his duty, leave it to them to hasten or to slacken his speed, …

… to give the reins to human passions as to let him deviate from the right path, he may, notwithstanding, without prejudice to his duty, leave it to them to hasten or to slacken his speed, and not fix himself like a motionless and insensible Colossus.

Could virtue itself put on flesh and blood, I believe the pulse would beat faster going on to assault than in going to dinner:

that is to say, there is a necessity she should heat and be moved upon this account.

“Let us, in God’s name, satisfy ourselves with what our fathers were contented with, with what we are.

We are great enough, if we rightly understand how to maintain it.

Let us not disown the fortune and condition of our ancestors, and let us lay aside these ridiculous pretences, that can never be wanting to any one that has the impudence to allege them.”

and the obscurest families are the most apt for falsification.

How many gentlemen have we in France who by their own account are of royal extraction? more, I think, than who will confess they are not.

Was it not a pleasant passage of a friend of mine? There were, several gentlemen assembled together about the dispute of one seigneur with another; which other had, in truth, some preeminence of titles and alliances above the ordinary gentry.

wherein do we place this renown that we hunt after with so much pains? It is, in the end, Peter or William that carries it, takes it into his possession, and whom it only concerns.

O what a valiant faculty is hope, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying its master’s indigence, at its pleasure, with all things he can imagine or desire!

Nature has given us this passion for a pretty toy to play withal. And this Peter or William, what is it but a sound, when all is done?

O what a valiant faculty is hope, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying its master’s indigence, at its pleasure, with all things he can imagine or desire!

Nature has given us this passion for a pretty toy to play withal.

And this Peter or William, what is it but a sound, when all is done?

Nature has given us this passion for a pretty toy to play withal.

And this Peter or William, what is it but a sound, when all is done?

or three or four dashes with a pen, so easy to be varied that I would fain know to whom is to be attributed the glory of so many victories, to Guesquin, to Glesquin, or to Gueaquin?

History tells us of three of the name of Socrates, of five Platos, of eight Aristotles, of seven Xenophons, of twenty Demetrii, and of twenty Theodores; and how many more she was not acquainted with we may imagine.

Who hinders my groom from calling himself Pompey the Great?

But after all, what virtue, what authority, or what secret springs are there that fix upon my deceased groom, or the other Pompey, who had his head cut off in Egypt, this glorious renown, and these so much honoured flourishes of the pen, so as …

By which examples we are wont to conclude, and with some reason, that events, especially in war, for the most part depend upon fortune, who will not be governed by nor submit unto human reasons and prudence, according to the poet:

But, to take the thing right, it should seem that our counsels and deliberations depend as much upon fortune as anything else we do,

and that she engages also our arguments in her uncertainty and confusion. “We argue rashly and adventurously,” says Timaeus in Plato, “by reason that, as well as ourselves, our discourses have great participation in the temerity of chance.”

Caesar had also one which had forefeet like those of a man, his hoofs being divided in the form of fingers, which likewise was not to be ridden, by any but Caesar himself, who, after his death, dedicated his statue to the goddess Venus.

I do not willingly alight when I am once on horseback, for it is the place where, whether well or sick, I find myself most at ease.

Plato recommends it for health, as also Pliny says it is good for the stomach and the joints. Let us go further into this matter since here we are.

The Argian and Roman ladies mourned in white, as ours did formerly and should do still, were I to govern in this point. But there are whole books on this subject.

The judgment is an utensil proper for all subjects, and will have an oar in everything:

which is the reason, that in these Essays I take hold of all occasions where, though it happen to be a subject I do not very well understand, I try, however, sounding it at a distance, and finding it too deep for my stature, I …

in such a case, ‘tis the work of the judgment to take the way that seems best, and of a thousand paths, to determine that this or that is the best.

I leave the choice of my arguments to fortune, and take that she first presents to me;

they are all alike to me, I never design to go through any of them; for I never see all of anything: neither do they who so largely promise to show it others.

All motion discovers us: the very same soul of Caesar, that made itself so conspicuous in marshalling and commanding the battle of Pharsalia, was also seen as solicitous and busy in the softer affairs of love and leisure.

A man makes a judgment of a horse, not only by seeing him when he is showing off his paces, but by his very walk, nay, and by seeing him stand in the stable.

Amongst the functions of the soul, there are some of a lower and meaner form; he who does not see her in those inferior offices as well as in those of nobler note, never fully discovers her;

every one is a queen in her own dominions. Let us, therefore, no more excuse ourselves upon the external qualities of things; it belongs to us to give ourselves an account of them.

Our good or ill has no other dependence but on ourselves.

‘Tis there that our offerings and our vows are due, and not to fortune she has no power over our manners; on the contrary, they draw and make her follow in their train, and cast her in their own mould.

Things in respect to themselves have, peradventure, their weight, measures, and conditions; but when we once take them into us, the soul forms them as she pleases.

Death is terrible to Cicero, coveted by Cato, indifferent to Socrates.

Health, conscience, authority, knowledge, riches, beauty, and their contraries, all strip themselves at their entering into us, and receive a new robe, and of another fashion, from the soul;

for to be eminent, to excel above the common rate in frivolous things, nowise befits a man of honour. What I say in this example may be said in all others.

Every particle, every employment of man manifests him equally with any other.

Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding human condition ridiculous and vain, never appeared abroad but with a jeering and laughing countenance; whereas Heraclitus commiserating that same condition of ours, appeared always with a sorrowful look, and tears in his eyes:

I am clearly for the first humour; not because it is more pleasant to laugh than to weep, but because it expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other, and I think we can never be despised according to our full desert.

Compassion and bewailing seem to imply some esteem of and value for the thing bemoaned; whereas the things we laugh at are by that expressed to be of no moment.

I do not think that we are so unhappy as we are vain, or have in us so much malice as folly; we are not so full of mischief as inanity; nor so miserable as we are vile and mean.

Compassion and bewailing seem to imply some esteem of and value for the thing bemoaned; whereas the things we laugh at are by that expressed to be of no moment.

I do not think that we are so unhappy as we are vain, or have in us so much malice as folly; we are not so full of mischief as inanity; nor so miserable as we are vile and mean.

And therefore Diogenes, who passed away his time in rolling himself in his tub, and made nothing of the great Alexander, esteeming us no better than flies or bladders puffed up with wind, was a sharper and more penetrating, and, consequently in my opinion, a …

and to the saying of Theodorus, that it was not reasonable a wise man should hazard himself for his country, and endanger wisdom for a company of fools.

Our condition is as ridiculous as risible.

A rhetorician of times past said, that to make little things appear great was his profession. This was a shoemaker, who can make a great shoe for a little foot.

—[A saying of Agesilaus.]—They would in Sparta have sent such a fellow to be whipped for making profession of a tricky and deceitful act;

“These are men,” said he, “born for war and great in execution; in the combat of the tongue altogether wanting; spirits truly consular. The subtle, eloquent, and learned are only good for the city, to make praetors of, to administer justice.”—[Livy, x. 22.]

Eloquence most flourished at Rome when the public affairs were in the worst condition and most disquieted with intestine commotions; as a free and untilled soil bears the worst weeds.

By which it should seem that a monarchical government has less need of it than any other:

when, after all, I find them but the paltry pieces of my own kitchen door.

To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, and other grammar words, would not one think they signified some rare and exotic form of speaking? And yet they are phrases that come near to the babble of my chambermaid.

And this other is a gullery of the same stamp, to call the offices of our kingdom by the lofty titles of the Romans, though they have no similitude of function, and still less of authority and power.

… whose writings, save tumid phrases set out with smart periods, ingenious indeed but far-fetched and fantastic, and the eloquence, be it what it may, I see nothing in him above the ordinary writers of his time, so far is he from approaching the ancient divinity.

And we make nothing of giving the surname of great to princes who have nothing more than ordinary in them.

Attilius Regulus, general of the Roman army in Africa, in the height of all his glory and victories over the Carthaginians, wrote to the Republic to acquaint them that a certain hind he had left in trust with his estate, which was in all but …

… sometimes bestow a little consideration upon ourselves, and employ the time we spend in prying into other men’s actions, and discovering things without us, in examining our own abilities we should soon perceive of how infirm and decaying material this fabric of ours is composed.

Is it not a singular testimony of imperfection that we cannot establish our satisfaction in any one thing, and that even our own fancy and desire should deprive us of the power to choose what is most proper and useful for us?

A very good proof of this is the great dispute that has ever been amongst the philosophers, of finding out man’s sovereign good, that continues yet, and will eternally continue, without solution or accord:

not that, in my judgment, they have not in them wherewith to do it, but because we seize them with an unruly and immoderate haste:

Our appetite is irresolute and fickle; it can neither keep nor enjoy anything with a good grace:

and man concluding it to be the fault of the things he is possessed of, fills himself with and feeds upon the idea of things he neither knows nor understands, to which he devotes his hopes and his desires, paying them all reverence and honour, …

… to give something for the reward of so rare a performance, he pleasantly, and in my opinion justly, ordered a certain number of bushels of the same grain to be delivered to him, that he might not want wherewith to exercise so famous an art.

‘Tis a strong evidence of a weak judgment when men approve of things for their being rare and new, or for their difficulty, where worth and usefulness are not conjoined to recommend them.

I come just now from playing with my own family at who could find out the most things that hold by their two extremities;

The faintness that surprises us from frigidity or dislike in the exercises of Venus are also occasioned by a too violent desire and an immoderate heat.

Extreme coldness and extreme heat boil and roast.

Aristotle says, that sows of lead will melt and run with cold and the rigour of winter just as with a vehement heat. Desire and satiety fill all the gradations above and below pleasure with pain.

Extreme coldness and extreme heat boil and roast. Aristotle says, that sows of lead will melt and run with cold and the rigour of winter just as with a vehement heat.

Desire and satiety fill all the gradations above and below pleasure with pain.

Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents. The wise control and triumph over ill, the others know it not:

the ordinary and middle condition of men are lodged betwixt these two extremities, consisting of such as perceive evils, feel them, and are not able to support them.

Infancy and decrepitude meet in the imbecility of the brain; avarice and profusion in the same thirst and desire of getting.

A man may say with some colour of truth that there is an Abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it: an ignorance that knowledge creates and begets, at the same time that it despatches and destroys the first.

… at the Benedicite, and as often at Grace (and the more, because it is a sign I have in great veneration and continual use, even when I yawn), and to dedicate all the other hours of the day to acts of malice, avarice, and injustice.

One hour to God, the rest to the devil, as if by composition and compensation.

‘Tis a wonder to see actions so various in themselves succeed one another with such an uniformity of method as not to interfere nor suffer any alteration, even upon the very confines and passes from the one to the other.

‘Tis a wonder to see actions so various in themselves succeed one another with such an uniformity of method as not to interfere nor suffer any alteration, even upon the very confines and passes from the one to the other.

What a prodigious conscience must that be that can be at quiet within itself whilst it harbours under the same roof, with so agreeing and so calm a society, both the crime and the judge?

A man whose whole meditation is continually working upon nothing but impurity which he knows to be so odious to Almighty God, what can he say when he comes to speak to Him? He draws back, but immediately falls into a relapse.

A true prayer and religious reconciling of ourselves to Almighty God cannot enter into an impure soul, subject at the very time to the dominion of Satan.

He who calls God to his assistance whilst in a course of vice, does as if a cut-purse should call a magistrate to help him, or like those who introduce the name of God to the attestation of a lie.

There are few men who durst publish to the world the prayers they make to Almighty God:

He who calls God to his assistance whilst in a course of vice, does as if a cut-purse should call a magistrate to help him, or like those who introduce the name of God to the attestation of a lie.

There are few men who durst publish to the world the prayers they make to Almighty God:

and this is the reason why the Pythagoreans would have them always public and heard by every one, to the end they might not prefer indecent or unjust petitions as this man:

The gods severely punished the wicked prayers of OEdipus in granting them: he had prayed that his children might amongst themselves determine the succession to his throne by arms, and was so miserable as to see himself taken at his word.

We are not to pray that all things may go as we would have them, but as most concurrent with prudence.

We seem, in truth, to make use of our prayers as of a kind of jargon, and as those do who employ holy words about sorceries and magical operations;

… to expect to die of a decay of strength, which is the effect of extremest age, and to propose to ourselves no shorter lease of life than that, considering it is a kind of death of all others the most rare and very seldom seen?

We call that only a natural death; as if it were contrary to nature to see a man break his neck with a fall, be drowned in shipwreck, be snatched away with a pleurisy or the plague, and as if our ordinary condition did not expose us to these inconveniences.

Let us no longer flatter ourselves with these fine words; we ought rather, peradventure, to call that natural which is general, common, and universal.

Let us no longer flatter ourselves with these fine words; we ought rather, peradventure, to call that natural which is general, common, and universal.

To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular, and, therefore, so much less natural than the others; ‘tis the last and extremest sort of dying: and the more remote, the less to be hoped for.

It is, indeed, the bourn beyond which we are not to pass, and which the law of nature has set as a limit, not to be exceeded; but it is, withal, a privilege she is rarely seen to give us to last till then.

I should be of opinion that our vocation and employment should be as far as possible extended for the public good: I find the fault on the other side, that they do not employ us early enough.

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.

For my part, I believe our souls are adult at twenty as much as they are ever like to be, and as capable then as ever.

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.

For my part, I believe our souls are adult at twenty as much as they are ever like to be, and as capable then as ever.

A soul that has not by that time given evident earnest of its force and virtue will never after come to proof. The natural qualities and virtues produce what they have of vigorous and fine, within that term or never,

for they commonly so strangely contradict one another that it seems impossible they should proceed from one and the same person. We find the younger Marius one while a son of Mars and another a son of Venus.

Pope Boniface VIII. entered, it is said, into his Papacy like a fox, behaved himself in it like a lion, and died like a dog;

and who could believe it to be the same Nero, the perfect image of all cruelty, who, having the sentence of a condemned man brought to him to sign, as was the custom, cried out, “O that I had never been taught to write!”

Augustus has escaped them, for there was in him so apparent, sudden, and continual variety of actions all the whole course of his life, that he has slipped away clear and undecided from the most daring critics.

I can more hardly believe a man’s constancy than any other virtue, and believe nothing sooner than the contrary.

He that would judge of a man in detail and distinctly, bit by bit, would oftener be able to speak the truth.

and change like that little creature which receives its colour from what it is laid upon. What we but just now proposed to ourselves we immediately alter, and presently return again to it; ‘tis nothing but shifting and inconsistency:

We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then with violence, according to the gentleness or rapidity of the current:

Every day a new whimsy, and our humours keep motion with the time.

We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then with violence, according to the gentleness or rapidity of the current:

Every day a new whimsy, and our humours keep motion with the time.

We fluctuate betwixt various inclinations; we will nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.

Every day a new whimsy, and our humours keep motion with the time.

We fluctuate betwixt various inclinations; we will nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.

In any one who had prescribed and established determinate laws and rules in his head for his own conduct, we should perceive an equality of manners, an order and an infallible relation of one thing or action to another, shine through his whole life;

and whoever will look narrowly into his own bosom, will hardly find himself twice in the same condition. I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another, according to the side I turn her to.

If I speak variously of myself, it is because I consider myself variously;

all the contrarieties are there to be found in one corner or another; after one fashion or another: bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal:

and whoever will sift himself to the bottom, will find in himself, and even in his own judgment, this volubility and discordance. I have nothing to say of myself entirely, simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion.

‘Distinguo’ is the most universal member of my logic.

Though I always intend to speak well of good things, and rather to interpret such things as fall out in the best sense than otherwise, yet such is the strangeness of our condition, that we are often pushed on to do well even by vice …

if the variety of occurrences makes him alter his pace (his path, I mean, for the pace may be faster or slower) let him go; such an one runs before the wind, “Avau le dent,” as the motto of our Talebot has it.

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

It is not possible for any one who has not designed his life for some certain end, it is impossible for any one to arrange the pieces, who has not the whole form already contrived in his imagination.

It is not possible for any one who has not designed his life for some certain end, it is impossible for any one to arrange the pieces, who has not the whole form already contrived in his imagination.

Of what use are colours to him that knows not what he is to paint?

No one lays down a certain design for his life, and we only deliberate thereof by pieces. The archer ought first to know at what he is to aim, and then accommodate his arm, bow, string, shaft, and motion to it;

The archer ought first to know at what he is to aim, and then accommodate his arm, bow, string, shaft, and motion to it; our counsels deviate and wander, because not levelled to any determinate end.

No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain, port.

I cannot acquiesce in the judgment given by one in the behalf of Sophocles, who concluded him capable of the management of domestic affairs, against the accusation of his son, from having read one of his tragedies.

and having taken the names of the owners, when they had assembled the citizens, they appointed these farmers for new governors and magistrates; concluding that they, who had been so provident in their own private concerns, would be so of the public too.

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:

Since ambition can teach man valour, temperance, and liberality, and even justice too;

The confounding of the order and measure of sins is dangerous: murderers, traitors, and tyrants get too much by it, and it is not reasonable they should flatter their consciences, because another man is idle, lascivious, or not assiduous at his devotion.

Every one overrates the offence of his companions, but extenuates his own.

Our very instructors themselves rank them sometimes, in my opinion, very ill.

this one is totally corporeal and earthly. And the rudest nation this day in Europe is that alone where it is in fashion. Other vices discompose the understanding: this totally overthrows it and renders the body stupid:

The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and government of himself.

And ‘tis said amongst other things upon this subject, that, as the must fermenting in a vessel, works up to the top whatever it has in the bottom, so wine, in those who have drunk beyond measure, vents the most inward secrets:

But he did not take it right, for delicacy and the curious choice of wines is therein to be avoided.

If you found your pleasure upon drinking of the best, you condemn yourself to the penance of drinking of the worst.

Your taste must be more indifferent and free; so delicate a palate is not required to make a good toper. The Germans drink almost indifferently of all wines with delight; their business is to pour down and not to taste;

Is it that we pretend to a reformation? Truly, no: but it may be we are more addicted to Venus than our fathers were. They are two exercises that thwart and hinder one another in their vigour.

Lechery weakens our stomach on the one side; and on the other sobriety renders us more spruce and amorous for the exercise of love.

‘Tis wonderful what strange stories I have heard my father tell of the chastity of that age wherein he lived. It was for him to say it, being both by art and nature cut out and finished for the service of ladies.

I mean when nothing should jostle and discompose her, which a thousand accidents may do. ‘Tis to much purpose that the great poet Lucretius keeps such a clatter with his philosophy, when, behold! he goes mad with a love philtre.

Is it to be imagined that an apoplexy will not stun Socrates as well as a porter?

Some men have forgotten their own names by the violence of a disease; and a slight wound has turned the judgment of others topsy-turvy. Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man;

‘Tis to much purpose that the great poet Lucretius keeps such a clatter with his philosophy, when, behold! he goes mad with a love philtre. Is it to be imagined that an apoplexy will not stun Socrates as well as a porter?

Some men have forgotten their own names by the violence of a disease; and a slight wound has turned the judgment of others topsy-turvy.

Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man; and than that what is there more frail, more miserable, or more nothing? Wisdom does not force our natural dispositions,

Is it to be imagined that an apoplexy will not stun Socrates as well as a porter? Some men have forgotten their own names by the violence of a disease; and a slight wound has turned the judgment of others topsy-turvy.

Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man; and than that what is there more frail, more miserable, or more nothing?

Wisdom does not force our natural dispositions,

The poets, that feign all things at pleasure, dare not acquit their greatest heroes of tears:

‘Tis sufficient for a man to curb and moderate his inclinations, for totally to suppress them is not in him to do.

Even our great Plutarch, that excellent and perfect judge of human actions, when he sees Brutus and Torquatus kill their children, begins to doubt whether virtue could proceed so far, and to question whether these persons had not rather been stimulated by some other passion.—[Plutarch, …

whether he pays before his day, or stay till his day of payment come; from whencesoever it comes, it is still his; in what part soever the thread breaks, there’s the end of the clue. The most voluntary death is the finest.

Life depends upon the pleasure of others; death upon our own.

We ought not to accommodate ourselves to our own humour in anything so much as in this. Reputation is not concerned in such an enterprise; ‘tis folly to be concerned by any such apprehension. Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting.

Life depends upon the pleasure of others; death upon our own. We ought not to accommodate ourselves to our own humour in anything so much as in this. Reputation is not concerned in such an enterprise; ‘tis folly to be concerned by any such apprehension.

Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting.

The ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life; they torment us with caustics, incisions, and amputations of limbs; they interdict aliment and exhaust our blood; one step farther and we are cured indeed and effectually.

no accidents can make true virtue turn her back; she seeks and requires evils, pains, and grief, as the things by which she is nourished and supported; the menaces of tyrants, racks, and tortures serve only to animate and rouse her:

‘Tis cowardice, not virtue, to lie squat in a furrow, under a tomb, to evade the blows of fortune; virtue never stops nor goes out of her path, for the greatest storm that blows:

For the most part, the flying from other inconveniences brings us to this; nay, endeavouring to evade death, we often run into its very mouth:

… best friend, namely himself, of life and his destined course, being neither compelled so to do by public judgment, by any sad and inevitable accident of fortune, nor by any insupportable disgrace, but merely pushed on by cowardice and the imbecility of a timorous soul.

And the opinion that makes so little of life, is ridiculous; for it is our being, ‘tis all we have.

Things of a nobler and more elevated being may, indeed, reproach ours; but it is against nature for us to contemn and make little account of ourselves; ‘tis a disease particular to man, and not discerned in any other creatures, to hate and despise itself.

not only those intrusted with me, but even such as fortune has guided to my hand; and am angry with myself if my eyes unawares steal any contents of letters of importance he is reading when I stand near a great man.

Never was man less inquisitive or less prying into other men’s affairs than I.

In our fathers’ days, Monsieur de Boutieres had like to have lost Turin from having, while engaged in good company at supper, delayed to read information that was sent him of the treason plotted against that city where he commanded.

Hesiod corrects the saying of Plato, that punishment closely follows sin, it being, as he says, born at the same time with it.

Whoever expects punishment already suffers it, and whoever has deserved it expects it.

Wickedness contrives torments against itself:

Apollodorus dreamed that he saw himself flayed by the Scythians and afterwards boiled in a cauldron, and that his heart muttered these words “I am the cause of all these mischiefs that have befallen thee.”

Epicurus said that no hiding-hole could conceal the wicked, since they could never assure themselves of being hid whilst their conscience discovered them to themselves.

As an ill conscience fills us with fear, so a good one gives us greater confidence and assurance;

Epicurus said that no hiding-hole could conceal the wicked, since they could never assure themselves of being hid whilst their conscience discovered them to themselves.

As an ill conscience fills us with fear, so a good one gives us greater confidence and assurance;

and I can truly say that I have gone through several hazards with a more steady pace in consideration of the secret knowledge I had of my own will and the innocence of my intentions:

He had naturally too high a spirit and was accustomed to too high a fortune, says Titius Livius, to know how to be criminal, and to lower himself to the meanness of defending his innocence.

The putting men to the rack is a dangerous invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth.

Both he who has the fortitude to endure it conceals the truth, and he who has not: for why should pain sooner make me confess what really is, than force me to say what is not?

But when all is done, ‘tis, in plain truth, a trial full of uncertainty and danger what would not a man say, what would not a man do, to avoid so intolerable torments?

Whence it comes to pass, that him whom the judge has racked that he may not die innocent, he makes him die both innocent and racked.

A thousand and a thousand have charged their own heads by false confessions, amongst whom I place Philotas, considering the circumstances of the trial Alexander put upon him and the progress of his torture.

others have deprived themselves of their dearest members, as of sight, and of the instruments of generation, lest their too delightful and effeminate service should soften and debauch the stability of their souls.

But in dying, which is the greatest work we have to do, practice can give us no assistance at all.

A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, necessity, and such-like accidents, but as to death, we can experiment it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.

… this short and quick instant of death, I could perceive the motion of the soul when she parts from the body, and whether she has any sentiment at the separation, that I may after come again if I can, to acquaint my friends with it.”

This man philosophises not unto death only, but in death itself.

What a strange assurance was this, and what bravery of courage, to desire his death should be a lesson to him, and to have leisure to think of other things in so great an affair:

If we cannot overtake it, we may approach it and view it, and if we do not advance so far as the fort, we may at least discover and make ourselves acquainted with the avenues.

It is not without reason that we are taught to consider sleep as a resemblance of death:

with how great facility do we pass from waking to sleeping, and with how little concern do we lose the knowledge of light and of ourselves.

our sufferings require time, which in death is so short, and so precipitous, that it must necessarily be insensible. They are the approaches that we are to fear, and these may fall within the limits of experience.

Many things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect;

I have passed a good part of my life in a perfect and entire health; I say, not only entire, but, moreover, sprightly and wanton.

And yet I do not think it a fault, if, as others do by other much less profitable sciences, I communicate what I have learned in this, though I am not very well pleased with my own progress.

There is no description so difficult, nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of a man’s self:

and withal, a man must curl his hair and set out and adjust himself, to appear in public: now I am perpetually tricking myself out, for I am eternally upon my own description.

for I do really find, that to get acquainted with death, needs no more but nearly to approach it. Every one, as Pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself, provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand.

Here, this is not my doctrine, ‘tis my study; and is not the lesson of another, but my own;

and if I communicate it, it ought not to be ill taken, for that which is of use to me, may also, peradventure, be useful to another. As to the rest, I spoil nothing, I make use of nothing but my own;

now I am perpetually tricking myself out, for I am eternally upon my own description. Custom has made all speaking of a man’s self vicious, and positively interdicts it, in hatred to the boasting that seems inseparable from the testimony men give of themselves:

Instead of blowing the child’s nose, this is to take his nose off altogether.

I think the remedy worse than the disease.

We confess ourselves religiously to God and our confessor; as our neighbours, do to all the people. But some will answer that we there speak nothing but accusation against ourselves; why then, we say all; for our very virtue itself is faulty and penetrable.

My trade and art is to live;

he that forbids me to speak according to my own sense, experience, and practice, may as well enjoin an architect not to speak of building according to his own knowledge, but according to that of his neighbour;

the wisest and devoutest men have lived in the greatest care to avoid all apparent effects. Effects would more speak of fortune than of me; they manifest their own office and not mine, but uncertainly and by conjecture; patterns of some one particular virtue.

I expose myself entire; ‘tis a body where, at one view, the veins, muscles, and tendons are apparent, every of them in its proper place;

here the effects of a cold; there of the heart beating, very dubiously. I do not write my own acts, but myself and my essence.

patterns of some one particular virtue. I expose myself entire; ‘tis a body where, at one view, the veins, muscles, and tendons are apparent, every of them in its proper place; here the effects of a cold; there of the heart beating, very dubiously.

I do not write my own acts, but myself and my essence.

I am of opinion that a man must be very cautious how he values himself, and equally conscientious to give a true report, be it better or worse, impartially. If I thought myself perfectly good and wise, I would rattle it out to some purpose.

I am of opinion that a man must be very cautious how he values himself, and equally conscientious to give a true report, be it better or worse, impartially. If I thought myself perfectly good and wise, I would rattle it out to some purpose.

To speak less of one’s self than what one really is is folly, not modesty;

and to take that for current pay which is under a man’s value is pusillanimity and cowardice, according to, Aristotle. No virtue assists itself with falsehood; truth is never matter of error.

The most sovereign remedy to cure it, is to do quite contrary to what these people direct who, in forbidding men to speak of themselves, consequently, at the same time, interdict thinking of themselves too.

Pride dwells in the thought; the tongue can have but a very little share in it.

They fancy that to think of one’s self is to be delighted with one’s self; to frequent and converse with one’s self, to be overindulgent;

Because Socrates had alone digested to purpose the precept of his god, “to know himself,” and by that study arrived at the perfection of setting himself at nought, he only was reputed worthy the title of a sage.

Whosoever shall so know himself, let him boldly speak it out.

They who write the life of Augustus Caesar,—[Suetonius, Life of Augustus, c. 25.]—observe this in his military discipline, that he was wonderfully liberal of gifts to men of merit, but that as to the true recompenses of honour he was as sparing;

I do not think that any citizen of Sparta glorified himself much upon his valour, it being the universal virtue of the whole nation; and as little upon his fidelity and contempt of riches.

There is no recompense becomes virtue, how great soever, that is once passed into a custom; and I know not withal whether we can ever call it great, being common.

Seeing, then, that these remunerations of honour have no other value and estimation but only this, that few people enjoy them, ‘tis but to be liberal of them to bring them down to nothing.

Wherein, finding myself totally unprovided and empty of other matter, I presented myself to myself for argument and subject.

‘Tis the only book in the world of its kind, and of a wild and extravagant design.

There is nothing worth remark in this affair but that extravagancy: for in a subject so vain and frivolous, the best workman in the world could not have given it a form fit to recommend it to any manner of esteem.

and I should have made it my business to fill their hearts with ingenuousness and freedom.

I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more wilfully obstinate.

Do we desire to be beloved of our children? Will we remove from them all occasion of wishing our death though no occasion of so horrid a wish can either be just or excusable?

Plato will have nobody marry before thirty; but he has reason to laugh at those who undertook the work of marriage after five-and-fifty, and condemns their offspring as unworthy of aliment and life.

Thales gave the truest limits, who, young and being importuned by his mother to marry, answered, “That it was too soon,” and, being grown into years and urged again, “That it was too late.”

A man must deny opportunity to every inopportune action.

Thales gave the truest limits, who, young and being importuned by his mother to marry, answered, “That it was too soon,” and, being grown into years and urged again, “That it was too late.”

A man must deny opportunity to every inopportune action.

The ancient Gauls’ looked upon it as a very horrid thing for a man to have society with a woman before he was twenty years of age, and strictly recommended to the men who designed themselves for war the keeping their virginity till well grown …

They have youth and vigour in possession, and consequently the breath and favour of the world; and therefore receive these fierce and tyrannical looks—mere scarecrows— of a man without blood, either in his heart or veins, with mockery and contempt.

Though I could make myself feared, I had yet much rather make myself beloved

: there are so many sorts of defects in old age, so much imbecility, and it is so liable to contempt, that the best acquisition a man can make is the kindness and affection of his own family;

consider, then, whether according to the vast difference between the purity of the age he lived in and the corruption of this of ours, he does not seem to shew us that wife, son, and servant, are so many enemies to us?

‘Tis well for old age that it is always accompanied by want of observation, ignorance, and a proneness to being deceived.

For should we see how we are used and would not acquiesce, what would become of us? especially in such an age as this, where the very judges who are to determine our controversies are usually partisans to the young, and interested in the cause.

I presently turn my eyes upon myself to see in what condition I am; whatever concerns another relates to me; the accident that has befallen him gives me caution, and rouses me to turn my defence that way.

We every day and every hour say things of another that we might properly say of ourselves, could we but apply our observation to our own concerns, as well as extend it to others.

And several authors have in this manner prejudiced their own cause by running headlong upon those they attack, and darting those shafts against their enemies, that are more properly, and with greater advantage, to be turned upon themselves.

it may know many things that are gone from me, and from me hold that which I have not retained; and which, as well as a stranger, I should borrow thence, should I stand in need.

If I am wiser than my book, it is richer than I.

There are few men addicted to poetry, who would not be much prouder to be the father to the AEneid than to the handsomest youth of Rome; and who would not much better bear the loss of the one than of the other.

Augustin, if, on the one hand, it had been proposed to him to bury his writings, from which religion has received so great fruit, or on the other to bury his children, had he had them, had he not rather chosen to bury his children.

And I know not whether I had not much rather have begot a very beautiful one, through society with the Muses, than by lying with my wife.

To this, such as it is, what I give it I give absolutely and irrevocably, as men do to their bodily children. That little I have done for it, is no more at my own disposal;

but I have utterly forgotten it; and if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention; so that I can promise no certainty, more than to make known to what point the knowledge I now have has risen.

Therefore, let none lay stress upon the matter I write, but upon my method in writing it.

Let them observe, in what I borrow, if I have known how to choose what is proper to raise or help the invention, which is always my own.

For I make others say for me, not before but after me, what, either for want of language or want of sense, I cannot myself so well express.

I do not number my borrowings, I weigh them; and had I designed to raise their value by number, I had made them twice as many

; they are all, or within a very few, so famed and ancient authors, that they seem, methinks, themselves sufficiently to tell who they are, without giving me the trouble.

My design is to pass over easily, and not laboriously, the remainder of my life; there is nothing that I will cudgel my brains about; no, not even knowledge, of what value soever.

I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an honest diversion; or, if I study, ‘tis for no other science than what treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and how to live well.

I do not bite my nails about the difficulties I meet with in my reading; after a charge or two, I give them over. Should I insist upon them, I should both lose myself and time;

Should I insist upon them, I should both lose myself and time; for I have an impatient understanding, that must be satisfied at first: what I do not discern at once is by persistence rendered more obscure.

I do nothing without gaiety; continuation and a too obstinate endeavour, darkens, stupefies, and tires my judgment.

My sight is confounded and dissipated with poring; I must withdraw it, and refer my discovery to new attempts;

as the heralds do. The Romans, in their religious exercises, began with ‘Hoc age’ as we in ours do with ‘Sursum corda’; these are so many words lost to me: I come already fully prepared from my chamber.

I need no allurement, no invitation, no sauce; I eat the meat raw

, so that, instead of whetting my appetite by these preparatives, they tire and pall it.

for I have a singular curiosity, as I have said elsewhere, to pry into the souls and the natural and true opinions of the authors, with whom I converse.

A man may indeed judge of their parts, but not of their manners nor of themselves, by the writings they exhibit upon the theatre of the world.

I have a thousand times lamented the loss of the treatise Brutus wrote upon Virtue, for it is well to learn the theory from those who best know the practice.

for he is not yet come to the arguments that serve to his purpose, and to the reasons that properly help to form the knot I seek.

For me, who only desire to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent, these logical and Aristotelian dispositions of parts are of no use.

I would have a man begin with the main proposition. I know well enough what death and pleasure are; let no man give himself the trouble to anatomise them to me.

For me, who only desire to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent, these logical and Aristotelian dispositions of parts are of no use. I would have a man begin with the main proposition.

I know well enough what death and pleasure are; let no man give himself the trouble to anatomise them to me.

I look for good and solid reasons, at the first dash, to instruct me how to stand their shock, for which purpose neither grammatical subtleties nor the quaint contexture of words and argumentations are of any use at all.

and that it only appertained to his to end so; notwithstanding, and according to reason, he commanded his son and the senators who accompanied him to take another course in their affairs:

Every death ought to hold proportion with the life before it; we do not become others for dying.

I always interpret the death by the life preceding; and if any one tell me of a death strong and constant in appearance, annexed to a feeble life, I conclude it produced by some feeble cause, and suitable to the life before.

I have not been very solicitous to curb the desires by which I have been importuned.

My virtue is a virtue, or rather an innocence, casual and accidental.

If I had been born of a more irregular complexion, I am afraid I should have made scurvy work; for I never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions, if they were never so little vehement:

To return to what I was saying before, I am tenderly compassionate of others’ afflictions, and should readily cry for company, if, upon any occasion whatever, I could cry at all.

Nothing tempts my tears but tears, and not only those that are real and true, but whatever they are, feigned or painted.

I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them rather; but I very much lament the dying. The savages do not so much offend me, in roasting and eating the bodies of the dead, as they do who torment and persecute the living.

Nothing tempts my tears but tears, and not only those that are real and true, but whatever they are, feigned or painted.

I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them rather; but I very much lament the dying.

The savages do not so much offend me, in roasting and eating the bodies of the dead, as they do who torment and persecute the living.

But supposing all this were not true, there is nevertheless a certain respect, a general duty of humanity, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees, and plants.

We owe justice to men, and graciousness and benignity to other creatures that are capable of it

; there is a certain commerce and mutual obligation betwixt them and us.

collecting their sayings and sentences as so many oracles, and with so much the greater reverence and religion as he was the less able to judge of them; for he had no knowledge of letters any more than his predecessors.

For my part I love them well, but I do not adore them.

Amongst others, Peter Bunel, a man of great reputation for knowledge in his time, having, with some others of his sort, staid some days at Montaigne in my father’s company, he presented him at his departure with a book, entitled Theologia naturalis;

and the same men one while damage our affairs by their violent heat and fierceness, and another by their coldness, gentleness, and slowness; but that they are pushed on by particular and casual considerations, according to the variety wherein they move?

I evidently perceive that we do not willingly afford devotion any other offices but those that least suit with our own passions.

There hostility so admirable as the Christian. Our zeal performs wonders, when it seconds our inclinations to hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, and rebellion:

but when it moves, against the hair, towards bounty, benignity, and temperance, unless, by miracle, some rare and virtuous disposition prompts us to it, we stir neither hand nor toot.

Our religion is intended to extirpate vices, whereas it screens, nourishes, and incites them.

We must not mock God.

There hostility so admirable as the Christian.

Our zeal performs wonders, when it seconds our inclinations to hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, and rebellion

: but when it moves, against the hair, towards bounty, benignity, and temperance, unless, by miracle, some rare and virtuous disposition prompts us to it, we stir neither hand nor toot. Our religion is intended to extirpate vices, whereas it screens, nourishes, and incites them.

‘tis for mortal and human religions to be received by human recommendation. What kind of faith can that be that cowardice and want of courage establish in us?

A pleasant faith, that does not believe what it believes but for want of courage to disbelieve it!

Can a vicious passion, such as inconstancy and astonishment, cause any regular product in our souls? “They are confident in their judgment,” says he, “that what is said of hell and future torments is all feigned:

These considerations ought, ‘tis true, to be applied to our belief but as subsidiaries only, for they are human obligations. Another religion, other witnesses, the like promises and threats, might, by the same way, imprint a quite contrary belief.

We are Christians by the same title that we are Perigordians or Germans.

And what Plato says, “That there are few men so obstinate in their atheism whom a pressing danger will not reduce to an acknowledgment of the divine power,” does not concern a true Christian:

The corruptible body stupifies the soul, and the earthly habitation dulls the faculties of the imagination.”

Presumption is our natural and original disease.

The most wretched and frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest.

Presumption is our natural and original disease.

The most wretched and frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest.

He feels and sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, the most remote from the heavenly arch, with animals of the …

… and distributes to them portions of faculties and force, as himself thinks fit How does he know, by the strength of his understanding, the secret and internal motions of animals?—from what comparison betwixt them and us does he conclude the stupidity he attributes to them?

When I play with my cat who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?

We mutually divert one another with our play. If I have my hour to begin or to refus, she also has hers.

With the head we invite, remand, confess, deny, give the lie, welcome, honour, reverence, disdain, demand, rejoice, lament, reject, caress, rebuke, submit, huff, encourage, threaten, assure, and inquire. What with the eyebrows?—what with the shoulders!

There is not a motion that does not speak, and in an intelligible language without discipline, and a public language that every one understands

: whence it should follow, the variety and use distinguished from others considered, that these should rather be judged the property of human nature.

All this I have said to prove the resemblance there is in human things, and to bring us back and join us to the crowd.

We are neither above nor below the rest

All that is under heaven, says the sage, runs one law and one fortune:

and those animals showed as much dexterity and judgment in pursuing the victory and stopping the pursuit; in charging and retiring, as occasion required; and in distinguishing their friends from their enemies, as they did ardour and fierceness.

We more admire and value things that are unusual and strange than those of ordinary observation.

I had not else so long insisted upon these examples: for I believe whoever shall strictly observe what we ordinarily see in those animals we have amongst us may there find as wonderful effects as those we seek in remote countries and ages.

Who did not attribute it to stupidity and want of common sense to see them mute, ignorant of the French tongue, ignorant of our salutations and cringes, our port and behaviour, from which all human nature must by all means take its pattern and example.

All that seems strange to us, and that we do not understand, we condemn.

The same thing happens also in the judgments we make of beasts. They have several conditions like to ours; from those we may, by comparison, draw some conjecture: but by those qualities that are particular to themselves, what know we what to make of them!

the same reason that makes us whip a lackey, falling into the hands of a king makes him ruin a whole province. They are as lightly moved as we, but they are able to do more.

In a gnat and an elephant the passion is the same.

As to fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man. Our histories have recorded the violent pursuits that dogs have made after the murderers of their masters.

but we are deceived; for they are pushed on, and pulled back in their motions, by the same springs that we are in our little undertakings.

The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes; the same reason that makes us whip a lackey, falling into the hands of a king makes him ruin a whole province.

They are as lightly moved as we, but they are able to do more. In a gnat and an elephant the passion is the same.

They are as lightly moved as we, but they are able to do more. In a gnat and an elephant the passion is the same.

As to fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man.

Our histories have recorded the violent pursuits that dogs have made after the murderers of their masters.

or shame and poverty less troublesome to the first than to the last?

I have known in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred labourers, wiser and more happy than the rectors of the university, and whom I had much rather have resembled.

Learning, methinks, has its place amongst the necessary, things of life, as glory, nobility, dignity, or at the most, as beauty, riches, and such other qualities, which indeed are useful to it, but remotely, and more by opinion than by nature.

Eritis sicut Dii, scientes bonum et malum. “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” And the sirens, in Homer, to allure Ulysses, and draw him within the danger of their snares, offered to give him knowledge.

The plague of man is the opinion of wisdom

; and for this reason it is that ignorance is so recommended to us, by our religion, as proper to faith and obedience; Cavete ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam et inanes seductiones, secundum elementa mundi.

… a man subjected to such imaginations, to that of a labourer that suffers himself to be led by his natural appetite, measuring things only by the present sense, without knowledge, and without prognostic, that feels no pain or sickness, but when he is really ill.

Whereas the other has the stone in his soul, before he has it in his bladder

; as if it were not time enough to suffer the evil when it shall come, he must anticipate it by fancy, and run to meet it.

Posidonius being tormented with a disease so painful as made him writhe his arms and gnash his teeth, thought he sufficiently scorned the dolour, by crying out against it: “Thou mayst do thy worst, I will not confess that thou art an evil.”

He was as sensible of the pain as my footman, but he made a bravado of bridling his tongue

, at least, and restraining it within the laws of his sect: Re succumbere non oportebat, verbis gloriantem. “It did not become him, that spoke so big, to confess his frailty when he came to the test.”

What puts the soul beside itself, and more usually throws it into madness, but her own promptness, vigour, and agility, and, finally, her own proper force?

Of what is the most subtle folly made, but of the most subtle wisdom?

As great friendships spring from great enmities, and vigorous health from mortal diseases, so from the rare and vivid agitations of our souls proceed the most wonderful and most distracted frenzies; ‘tis but half a turn of the toe from the one to the other.

Would you have a man healthy, would you have him regular, and in a steady and secure posture? Muffle him up in the shades of stupidity and sloth.

We must be made beasts to be made wise, and hoodwinked before we are fit to be led.

And if one shall tell me that the advantage of having a cold and dull sense of pain and other evils, brings this disadvantage along with it, to render us consequently less sensible also in the fruition of good and pleasure, this is true;

but the misery of our condition is such that we have not so much to enjoy as to avoid, and that the extremest pleasure does not affect us to the degree that a light grief does: Segnius homines bona quam mala sentiunt.

We are not so sensible of the most perfect health as we are of the least sickness.

Our well-being is nothing but the not being ill. Which is the reason why that sect of philosophers, which sets the greatest value upon pleasure, has yet fixed it chiefly in unconsciousness of pain.

Segnius homines bona quam mala sentiunt. We are not so sensible of the most perfect health as we are of the least sickness.

Our well-being is nothing but the not being ill.

Which is the reason why that sect of philosophers, which sets the greatest value upon pleasure, has yet fixed it chiefly in unconsciousness of pain. To be freed from ill is the greatest good that man can hope for or desire; as Ennius says,—

Istud nihil dolere, non sine magn mercede contingit, immanitatis in animo, stuporis in corpore. “An insensibility that is not to be purchased but at the price of inhumanity in the soul, and of stupidity of the body.” Evil appertains to man of course.

Neither is pain always to be avoided, nor pleasure always pursued.

‘Tis a great advantage to the honour of ignorance that knowledge itself throws us into its arms, when she finds herself puzzled to fortify us against the weight of evil;

To empty and disfurnish the memory, is not this the true way to ignorance?

We find several other like precepts, whereby we are permitted to borrow frivolous appearances from the vulgar, where we find the strongest reason will not answer the purpose, provided they administer satisfaction and comfort Where they cannot cure the wound, they are content to palliate …

That Sextius, of whom both Seneca and Plutarch speak with so high an encomium, having applied himself, all other things set aside, to the study of philosophy, resolved to throw himself into the sea, seeing the progress of his studies too tedious and slow.

He ran to find death, since he could not overtake knowledge.

These are the words of the law upon the subject: “If peradventure some great inconvenience happen, for which there is no remedy, the haven is near, and a man may save himself by swimming out of his body as out of a leaky skiff;

and that, on the contrary, those of his time were all sweet odour without, but stunk within of all sorts of vices; that is to say, as I interpret it, that they abounded with learning and eloquence, but were very defective in moral honesty.

Incivility, ignorance, simplicity, roughness, are the natural companions of innocence; curiosity, subtlety, knowledge, bring malice in their train

; humility, fear, obedience, and affability, which are the principal things that support and maintain human society, require an empty and docile soul, and little presuming upon itself.

‘Tis, peradventure, the meaning of this old Greek saying, that superstition follows pride, and obeys it as if it were a father: [—Greek—]

Ah, presumption, how much dost thou hinder us?

After that Socrates was told that the god of wisdom had assigned to him the title of sage, he was astonished at it, and, searching and examining himself throughout, could find no foundation for this divine judgment.

“Dust and ashes,” says it to such, “what hast thou wherein to glorify thyself?” And, in another place, “God has made man like unto a shadow,” of whom who can judge, when by removing the light it shall be vanished!

Man is a thing of nothing.

Our force is so far from being able to comprehend the divine height, that, of the works of our Creator, those best bear his mark, and are with better title his, which we the least understand.

If they please thee and the other sages, publish; if not, suppress them. They contain no certainty with which I myself am satisfied. Neither do I pretend to know the truth, or to attain to it. I rather open than discover things.”

The wisest man that ever was, being asked what he knew, made answer, “He knew this, that he knew nothing.”

By which he verified what has been said, that the greatest part of what we know is the least of what we do not;

hoc liberiores et solutiores, quod integra illis est judicandi potestas: “in this more unconstrained and free, because they have the greater power of judging.” Is it not of some advantage to be disengaged from the necessity that curbs others?

Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle one’s self in the innumerable errors that human fancy has produced?

Is it not much better to suspend one’s persuasion than to intermeddle with these wrangling and seditious divisions: “What shall I choose?” “What you please, provided you will choose.” A very foolish answer;

There are, say they, true and false, and we have in us wherewith to seek it; but not to make it stay when we touch it. We are much more prudent, in letting ourselves be regulated by the order of the world, without inquiry.

A soul clear from prejudice has a marvellous advance towards tranquillity and repose.

Men that judge and control their judges, do never duly submit to them.

neither disbelieving nor establishing any dogma against common observances; humble, obedient, disciplinable, and studious; a sworn enemy of heresy; and consequently freeing himself from vain and irreligious opinions, introduced by false sects.

‘Tis a blank paper prepared to receive such forms from the finger of God as he shall please to write upon it.

The more we resign and commit ourselves to God, and the more we renounce ourselves, of the greater value we are. “Take in good part,” says Ecclesiastes, “the things that present themselves to thee, as they seem and taste from hand to mouth;

Clitomachus affirmed “That he could never discover by Carneades’s writings what opinion he was of.” This was it that made Epicurus affect to be abstruse, and that procured Heraclitus the epithet of [—Greek—]

Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of, like jugglers, to conceal the vanity of their art, and which human sottishness easily takes for current pay.

Cicero reprehends some of his friends for giving more of their time to the study of astrology, logic, and geometry, than they were really worth; saying that they were by these diverted from the duties of life, and more profitable and proper studies.

It is very easy to distinguish that some of the sects have more followed truth, and the others utility, by which the last have gained their reputation.

‘Tis the misery of our condition that often that which presents itself to our imagination for the truest does not appear the most useful to life.

The boldest sects, as the Epicurean, Pyrrhonian, and the new Academic, are yet constrained to submit to the civil law at the end of the account.

so soon as she loses that great and common road, she enters into a labyrinth of a thousand several paths.

Man cannot be any thing but what he is, nor imagine beyond the reach of his capacity.

“Tis a greater presumption,” says Plutarch, “in them who are but men to attempt to speak and discourse of the gods and demi-gods than it is in a man utterly ignorant of music to give an opinion of singing;

Our speaking has its failings and defects, as well as all the rest.

Most of the occasions of disturbance in the world are grammatical ones; our suits only spring from disputes as to the interpretation of laws; and most wars proceed from the inability of ministers clearly to express the conventions and treaties of amity of princes.

How many quarrels, and of how great importance, has the doubt of the meaning of this syllable, hoc,* created in the world? Let us take the clearest conclusion that logic itself

“The gods are concerned at great matters, but slight the small.” Listen to him; he will clear this to you by his reason: Nec in regnis quidem reges omnia minima curant: “Neither indeed do kings in their administration take notice of all the least concerns.”

As if to that King of kings it were more or less to subvert a kingdom, or to move the leaf of a tree; or as if his providence acted after another manner in inclining the event of a battle than in the leap of a flea.

The hand of his government is laid upon every thing after the same manner, with the same power and order; our interest does nothing towards it; our inclinations and measures sway nothing with him.

“Has your nation,” said he to them, “the power to make gods of whom they please? Pray first deify some one amongst yourselves, and when I shall see what advantage he has by it, I will thank you for your offer.”

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.

Hear Trismegistus in praise of our sufficiency: “Of all the wonderful things, it surmounts all wonder that man could find out the divine nature and make it.” And take here the arguments of the school of philosophy itself:—

“As if any thing could be more unhappy than man, who is insulted over by his own imagination.”

‘Tis far from honouring him who made us, to honour him that we have made.

Augustus had more temples than Jupiter, served with as much religion and belief of miracles. The Thracians, in return of the benefits they had received from Agesilaus, came to bring him word that they had canonized him:

infinite in titles and offices; some good; others ill; some old and decrepit, and some that are mortal. For Chrysippus was of opinion that in the last conflagration of the world all the gods were to die but Jupiter.

Man makes a thousand pretty societies betwixt God and him; is he not his countryman?

And this is the excuse that, upon consideration of this subject, Scvola, a high priest, and Varro, a great theologian in their times, make us:

and, which is worse, that it will there consume; and in making the sun and fire one, that fire does not turn the complexions black in shining upon them; that we are able to look fixedly upon fire; and that fire kills herbs and plants.

‘Tis Socrates’s opinion, and mine too, that the best judging of heaven is not to judge of it at all.

Plato having occasion, in his Timous, to speak of the demons, “This undertaking,” says he, “exceeds my ability.” We are therefore to believe those ancients who said they were begotten by them;

Good God, what abuse, what mistakes should we discover in our poor science! I am mistaken if that weak knowledge of ours holds any one thing as it really is, and

I shall depart hence more ignorant of all other things than my own ignorance.

Have I not read in Plato this divine saying, that “nature is nothing but enigmatic poesy!” As if a man might perhaps see a veiled and shady picture, breaking out here and there with an infinite variety of false lights to puzzle our conjectures:

ut nulla acies humani ingenii tanta sit, qu penetrare in coelum, terram intrare, possit. “All those things lie concealed and involved in so dark an obscurity that no point of human wit can be so sharp as to pierce heaven or penetrate the earth.”

And certainly philosophy is no other than sophisticated poetry.

Whence do the ancient writers extract their authorities but from the poets? and the first of them were poets themselves, and writ accordingly. Plato is but a poet unripped. Timon calls him, insultingly, “a monstrous forger of miracles.”

And certainly philosophy is no other than sophisticated poetry. Whence do the ancient writers extract their authorities but from the poets? and the first of them were poets themselves, and writ accordingly.

Plato is but a poet unripped.

Timon calls him, insultingly, “a monstrous forger of miracles.” All superhuman sciences make use of the poetic style. Just as women make use of teeth of ivory where the natural are wanting, and instead of their true complexion make one of some artificial matter;

‘Tis not to heaven only that art sends her ropes, engines, and wheels; let us consider a little what she says of us ourselves, and of our contexture.

There is not more retrogradation, trepidation, accession, recession, and astonishment, in the stars and celestial bodies, than they have found out in this poor little human body.

In earnest, they have good reason, upon that very account, to call it the little world, so many tools and parts have they employed to erect and build it.

For every human presupposition and declaration has as much authority one as another, if reason do not make the difference. Wherefore they are all to be put into the balance, and first the generals and those that tyrannize over us.

The persuasion of certainty is a certain testimony of folly and extreme incertainty

; and there are not a more foolish sort of men, nor that are less philosophers, than the Philodoxes of Plato; we must inquire whether fire be hot? whether snow be white? if there be any such things as hard or soft within our knowledge?

… are false in themselves, but silly ones, that do not hold in themselves, and that accuse their authors not so much of ignorance as imprudence, in the reproaches the philosophers dash one another in the teeth withal, upon their dissensions in their sects and opinions.

Whoever should bundle up a lusty faggot of the fooleries of human wisdom would produce wonders.

I willingly muster up these few for a pattern, by a certain meaning not less profitable to consider than the most sound and moderate instructions.

… to the world’s view, and that to expose them to the light in a little more decent garb I went to adorn them with reasons and examples, it was a wonder to myself accidentally to find them conformable to so many philosophical discourses and examples.

I never knew what regimen my life was of till it was near worn out and spent; a new figure—an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher.

But to return to the soul. Inasmuch as Plato has placed reason in the brain, anger in the heart, and concupiscence in the liver; ‘tis likely that it was rather an interpretation of the movements of

Human fancy can conceive nothing good or bad that is not there: Nihil tam absurde did potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum. “

Nothing can be said so absurd, that has not been said before by some of the philosophers.

” And I am the more willing to expose my whimsies to the public;

This saint has very much obliged me: Ipsa veritatis occultatio ant humili-tatis exercitatio est, aut elationis attritio “The very concealment of the truth is either an exercise of humility or a quelling of presumption.”

To what a pitch of presumption and insolence do we raise our blindness and folly!

But to return to my subject.

‘tis a desperate thrust, wherein you are to quit your own arms to make your adversary abandon his; and a secret sleight, which must be very rarely, and then very reservedly, put in practice.

‘Tis great temerity to lose yourself that you may destroy another

; you must not die to be revenged, as Gobrias did;

*tis more expedient to put them under pupilage.

Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly

;

when are we to expect that they will be agreed?

We are nearer neighbours to ourselves than whiteness to snow, or weight to stones.

If man do not know himself, how should he know his force and functions? It is not, perhaps, that we have not some real knowledge in us; but ‘tis by chance;

A man must at least become wise at his own expense; if I have often found myself betrayed under this colour; if my touch proves commonly false, and my balance unequal and unjust, what assurance can I now have more than at other times?

Is it not stupidity and madness to suffer myself to be so often deceived by my guide?

Nevertheless, let fortune remove and shift us five hundred times from place to place, let her do nothing but incessantly empty and fill into our belief, as into a vessel, other and other opinions;

but has it not befallen me, not only once, but a hundred, a thousand times, every day, to have embraced some other thing with all the same instruments, and in the same condition, which I have since judged to be false?

A man must at least become wise at his own expense

; if I have often found myself betrayed under this colour; if my touch proves commonly false, and my balance unequal and unjust, what assurance can I now have more than at other times?

I cannot suffer my judgment to be so flexible.

What kind of virtue is that which I see one day in repute, and that to-morrow shall be in none, and which the crossing of a river makes a crime?

What sort of truth can that be, which these mountains limit to us, and make a lie to all the world beyond them?

I cannot suffer my judgment to be so flexible. What kind of virtue is that which I see one day in repute, and that to-morrow shall be in none, and which the crossing of a river makes a crime?

What sort of truth can that be, which these mountains limit to us, and make a lie to all the world beyond them?

But they are pleasant, when, to give some certainty to the laws, they say, that there are some firm, perpetual, and immovable, which they call natural, that are imprinted in human kind by the condition of their own proper being;

Diogenes was washing cabbages, and seeing him pass by, “If thou couldst live on cabbage,” said he, “thou wouldst not fawn upon a tyrant;” to whom Aristippus replied, “And if thou knewest how to live amongst men, thou wouldst not be washing cabbages.”

Thus reason finds appearances for divers effects; ‘tis a pot with two ears that a man may take by the right or left

:—

that is to say, that truth was there so controverted and disputed that in a like cause he might favour which of the parties he thought fit

‘Twas only for want of wit that he did not write “a question for a friend” throughout.

The advocates and judges of our times find bias enough in all causes to accommodate them to what they themselves think fit.

These last two stoical quotations, and the reproach that Dicarchus threw into the teeth of Plato himself, upon this account, show how much the soundest philosophy indulges licenses and excesses very remote from common custom.

Laws derive their authority from possession and custom.

‘Tis dangerous to trace them back to their beginning; they grow great, and ennoble themselves, like our rivers, by running on; but follow them upward to their source, ‘tis but a little spring, scarce discernable,

This experience diversifies itself in a thousand examples:—

A philosopher being taken in the very act, and asked what he was doing, coldly replied, “I am planting man;” no more blushing to be so caught than if they had found him planting garlic.

It is, I suppose, out of tenderness and respect to the natural modesty of mankind that a great and religious author is of opinion that this act is so necessarily obliged to privacy and shame that he cannot persuade himself there could be any absolute …

there she sleeps, here she slumbers; but, whether more or less, ‘tis still dark, and Cimmerian darkness.

We wake sleeping, and sleep waking.

I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear enough and free from clouds; moreover, sleep, when it is profound, sometimes rocks even dreams themselves asleep;

… represents things to itself erroneously, and that we are of opinion they stand in as much need of us as we do of them, like people at sea, to whom mountains, fields, cities, heaven and earth are tossed at the same rate as they are:

Whoever saw old age that did not applaud the past and condemn the present time, laying the fault of his misery and discontent upon the world and the manners of men?

We will make all things go along with us; whence it follows that we consider our death as a very great thing, and that does not so easily pass, nor without the solemn consultation of the stars:

… that find out two lines incessantly approaching each other, which yet can never meet, and the philosopher’s stone, and the quadrature of the circle, where the reason and the effect are so opposite, might, peradventure, find some argument to second this bold saying of Pliny:

There is no reason that has not its contrary, say the wisest of the philosophers.

I was just now ruminating on the excellent saying one of the ancients alleges for the contempt of life: “No good can bring pleasure, unless it be that for the loss of which we are beforehand prepared.”

the facility presently sated him as towards his own, but towards strange mares, and the first that passed by the pale of his pasture, he would again fall to his importunate neighings and his furious heats as before.

Our appetite contemns and passes by what it has in possession, to run after that it has not:

To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to’t:

to give it wholly up to us is to beget in us contempt. Want and abundance fall into the same inconvenience:

to give it wholly up to us is to beget in us contempt. Want and abundance fall into the same inconvenience:

Desire and fruition equally afflict us.

The rigors of mistresses are troublesome, but facility, to say truth, still more so; forasmuch as discontent and anger spring from the esteem we have of the thing desired, heat and actuate love, but satiety begets disgust;

for my part, I stir not. Amongst so many garrisoned houses, myself alone amongst those of my rank, so far as I know, in France, have trusted purely to Heaven for the protection of mine, and have never removed plate, deeds, or hangings.

I will neither fear nor save myself by halves.

If a full acknowledgment acquires the Divine favour, it will stay with me to the end: if not, I have still continued long enough to render my continuance remarkable and fit to be recorded. How? Why, there are thirty years that I have thus lived.

it is never shut to any one that knocks; my gate has no other guard than a porter, and he of ancient custom and ceremony; who does not so much serve to defend it as to offer it with more decorum and grace;

I have no other guard nor sentinel than the stars.

A gentleman would play the fool to make a show of defence, if he be not really in a condition to defend himself. He who lies open on one side, is everywhere so; our ancestors did not think of building frontier garrisons.

secure enough, if they could shroud themselves from accusations, witnesses, and the cognisance of the laws:

Virtue is a very vain and frivolous thing if it derive its recommendation from glory; and ‘tis to no purpose that we endeavour to give it a station by itself, and separate it from fortune; for what is more accidental than reputation?

So to order it that actions may be known and seen is purely the work of fortune; ‘tis chance that helps us to glory, according to its own temerity. I have often seen her go before merit, and often very much outstrip it.

and the judgment of our inclinations and actions, the most difficult and most important matter that is, we refer to the voice and determination of the rabble, the mother of ignorance, injustice, and inconstancy.

Is it reasonable that the life of a wise man should depend upon the judgment of fools?

He that makes it his business to please them, will have enough to do and never have done; ‘tis a mark that can never be aimed at or hit:

There is I know not what natural sweetness in hearing one’s self commended; but we are a great deal too fond of it:

I care not so much what I am in the opinions of others, as what I am in my own; I would be rich of myself, and not by borrowing.

Strangers see nothing but events and outward appearances; everybody can set a good face on the matter, when they have trembling and terror within: they do not see my heart, they see but my countenance.

Is it not strange that even of the Greeks and Romans, with so many writers and witnesses, and so many rare and noble exploits, so few are arrived at our knowledge:

It will be much if, a hundred years hence, it be remembered in general that in our times there were civil wars in France.

The Lacedaemonians, entering into battle, sacrificed to the Muses, to the end that their actions might be well and worthily written, looking upon it as a divine and no common favour, that brave acts should find witnesses that could give them life and memory.

‘tis all the reason in the world he should discern in himself, as well as in others, what truth sets before him; if it be Caesar, let him boldly think himself the greatest captain in the world.

We are nothing but ceremony: ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things:

we hold by the branches, and quit the trunk and the body; we have taught the ladies to blush when they hear that but named which they are not at all afraid to do:

and I do not value myself upon any other account than because I know my own value. If there be any vanity in the case, ‘tis superficially infused into me by the treachery of my complexion, and has no body that my judgment can discern:

I am sprinkled, but not dyed.

For in truth, as to the effects of the mind, there is no part of me, be it what it will, with which I am satisfied; and the approbation of others makes me not think the better of myself.

but, in good earnest, when I apply myself to it, I play the child, and am not able to endure myself. A man may play the fool in everything else, but not in poetry;

I would to God this sentence was written over the doors of all our printers, to forbid the entrance of so many rhymesters!

Why have not we such people?—[As those about to be mentioned.]— Dionysius the father valued himself upon nothing so much as his poetry;

Extremely idle, extremely given up to my own inclination both by nature and art,

I would as willingly lend a man my blood as my pains.

I have a soul free and entirely its own, and accustomed to guide itself after its own fashion; having hitherto never had either master or governor imposed upon me: I have walked as far as I would, and at the pace that best pleased myself;

and I find my mind more put to it to undergo the various tumblings and tossings of doubt and consultation, than to set up its rest and to acquiesce in whatever shall happen after the die is thrown.

Few passions break my sleep, but of deliberations, the least will do it.

As in roads, I preferably avoid those that are sloping and slippery, and put myself into the beaten track how dirty or deep soever, where I can fall no lower, and there seek my safety:

so I love misfortunes that are purely so, that do not torment and tease me with the uncertainty of their growing better; but that at the first push plunge me directly into the worst that can be expected

In events I carry myself like a man; in conduct, like a child.

The fear of the fall more fevers me than the fall itself. The game is not worth the candle. The covetous man fares worse with his passion than the poor, and the jealous man than the cuckold;

In events I carry myself like a man; in conduct, like a child.

The fear of the fall more fevers me than the fall itself.

The game is not worth the candle. The covetous man fares worse with his passion than the poor, and the jealous man than the cuckold; and a man ofttimes loses more by defending his vineyard than if he gave it up.

I should find the best qualities I have useless in this age; the facility of my manners would have been called weakness and negligence; my faith and conscience, scrupulosity and superstition; my liberty and freedom would have been reputed troublesome, inconsiderate, and rash.

Ill luck is good for something.

It is good to be born in a very depraved age; for so, in comparison of others, you shall be reputed virtuous good cheap;

the facility of my manners would have been called weakness and negligence; my faith and conscience, scrupulosity and superstition; my liberty and freedom would have been reputed troublesome, inconsiderate, and rash. Ill luck is good for something.

It is good to be born in a very depraved age; for so, in comparison of others, you shall be reputed virtuous good cheap;

he who in our days is but a parricide and a sacrilegious person is an honest man and a man of honour:

My soul naturally abominates lying, and hates the very thought of it. I have an inward shame and a sharp remorse, if sometimes a lie escapes me: as sometimes it does, being surprised by occasions that allow me no premeditation.

A man must not always tell all, for that were folly: but what a man says should be what he thinks, otherwise ‘tis knavery.

I do not know what advantage men pretend to by eternally counterfeiting and dissembling, if not never to be believed when they speak the truth; it may once or twice pass with men;

Memory is the receptacle and case of science: and therefore mine being so treacherous, if I know little, I cannot much complain. I know, in general, the names of the arts, and of what they treat, but nothing more.

I turn over books; I do not study them.

What I retain I no longer recognise as another’s; ‘tis only what my judgment has made its advantage of, the discourses and imaginations in which it has been instructed: the author, place, words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget;

the author, place, words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget; and I am so excellent at forgetting, that I no less forget my own writings and compositions than the rest.

I am very often quoted to myself, and am not aware of it.

Whoever should inquire of me where I had the verses and examples, that I have here huddled together, would puzzle me to tell him, and yet I have not borrowed them but from famous and known authors, not contenting myself that they were rich, if …

I will not, therefore, omit this blemish though very unfit to be published, which is irresolution; a very great effect and very incommodious in the negotiations of the affairs of the world; in doubtful enterprises, I know not which to choose:

I can maintain an opinion, but I cannot choose one.

By reason that in human things, to what sect soever we incline, many appearances present themselves that confirm us in it; and the philosopher Chrysippus said, that he would of Zeno and Cleanthes, his masters, learn their doctrines only;

and I observe, with great consideration of our human infirmity, the examples that the divine history itself has left us of this custom of referring to fortune and chance the determination of election in doubtful things:

Human reason is a two-edged and dangerous sword:

observe in the hands of Socrates, her most intimate and familiar friend, how many several points it has. I am thus good for nothing but to follow and suffer myself to be easily carried away with the crowd;

… are many that are barbarous and monstrous nevertheless, by reason of the difficulty of reformation, and the danger of stirring things, if I could put something under to stop the wheel, and keep it where it is, I would do it with all my heart:

The worst thing I find in our state is instability, and that our laws, no more than our clothes, cannot settle in any certain form.

It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it: it is very easy to beget in a people a contempt of ancient observances; never any man undertook it but he did it;

I am willing to let it be guided by the public rule. Happy the people who do what they are commanded, better than they who command, without tormenting themselves as to the causes; who suffer themselves gently to roll after the celestial revolution!

Obedience is never pure nor calm in him who reasons and disputes.

In fine, to return to myself: the only thing by which I something esteem myself, is that wherein never any man thought himself to be defective; my recommendation is vulgar, common, and popular; for who ever thought he wanted sense?

‘tis tenacious and strong, but what the first ray of the patient’s sight nevertheless pierces through and disperses, as the beams of the sun do thick and obscure mists; to accuse one’s self would be to excuse in this case, and to condemn, to absolve.

There never was porter or the silliest girl, that did not think they had sense enough to do their business.

We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty, but an advantage in judgment we yield to none;

Now I find my opinions very bold and constant in condemning my own imperfection. And, to say the truth, ‘tis a subject upon which I exercise my judgment as much as upon any other.

The world looks always opposite; I turn my sight inwards, and there fix and employ it.

I have no other business but myself, I am eternally meditating upon myself, considering and tasting myself. Other men’s thoughts are ever wandering abroad, if they will but see it; they are still going forward:

I, on the contrary, am the bolder, by reason the subject is so poor and sterile that I cannot be suspected of ostentation. I judge freely of the actions of others; I give little of my own to judge of, because they are nothing:

I do not find so much good in myself, that I cannot tell it without blushing.

What contentment would it not be to me to hear any one thus relate to me the manners, faces, countenances, the ordinary words and fortunes of my ancestors? how attentively should I listen to it!

I preserve their writing, seal, and a particular sword they wore, and have not thrown the long staves my father used to carry in his hand, out of my closet.

If my posterity, nevertheless, shall be of another mind, I shall be avenged on them; for they cannot care less for me than I shall then do for them.

All the traffic that I have in this with the public is, that I borrow their utensils of writing, which are more easy and most at hand;

painting myself for others, I represent myself in a better colouring than my own natural complexion.

I have no more made my book than my book has made me

: ‘tis a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my life, and whose business is not designed for others, as that of all other books is.

The first thing done in the corruption of manners is banishing truth; for, as Pindar says, to be true is the beginning of a great virtue, and the first article that Plato requires in the governor of his Republic.

The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man persuades another man to believe;

as we generally give the name of money not only to pieces of the dust alloy, but even to the false also, if they will pass. Our nation has long been reproached with this vice;

Caesar is sometimes called thief, and sometimes drunkard, to his teeth. We see the liberty of invective they practised upon one another, I mean the greatest chiefs of war of both nations, where words are only revenged with words, and do not proceed any farther.

‘Tis usual to see good intentions, if carried on without moderation, push men on to very vicious effects.

In this dispute which has at this time engaged France in a civil war, the better and the soundest cause no doubt is that which maintains the ancient religion and government of the kingdom.

nor the Cyrenaic and Aristippic pleasure, been without mixture useful to it. Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience:

Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it; would you not say that it is dying of pain?

Nay, when we frame the image of it in its full excellence, we stuff it with sickly and painful epithets and qualities, languor, softness, feebleness, faintness, ‘morbidezza’: a great testimony of their consanguinity and consubstantiality.

would you not say that it is dying of pain? Nay, when we frame the image of it in its full excellence, we stuff it with sickly and painful epithets and qualities, languor, softness, feebleness, faintness, ‘morbidezza’: a great testimony of their consanguinity and consubstantiality.

The most profound joy has more of severity than gaiety, in it.

The highest and fullest contentment offers more of the grave than of the merry:

Labour and pleasure, very unlike in nature, associate, nevertheless, by I know not what natural conjunction.

Socrates says, that some god tried to mix in one mass and to confound pain and pleasure, but not being able to do it; he bethought him at least to couple them by the tail.

Metrodorus said, that in sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure. I know not whether or no he intended anything else by that saying;

… and loyal a lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself.

Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley.

Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra’s head, who pretend to clear the law of all inconveniences:

for which, being reproved by his physician, as a thing prejudicial to his health,

“An emperor,” said he, “must die standing.”

A fine saying, in my opinion, and worthy a great prince.

nor even so much as these, considering that in such work as that, the direction and command that deserve honour are only such as are given upon the spot, and in the heat of the business.

No pilot performs his office by standing still.

The princes of the Ottoman family, the chiefest in the world in military fortune, have warmly embraced this opinion, and Bajazet II., with his son, who swerved from it, spending their time in science and other retired employments, gave great blows to their empire;

but a man cannot live otherwise at Rome; I am not wasteful, but the city requires a great outlay; ‘tis not my fault if I am choleric—if I have not yet established any certain course of life: ‘tis the fault of youth.

Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; ‘tis in us, and planted in our bowels;

and the mere fact that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick, renders us more hard to be cured. If we do not betimes begin to see to ourselves, when shall we have provided for so many wounds and evils wherewith we abound?

I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty; and I have found by experience that malicious and inhuman animosity and fierceness are usually accompanied with feminine weakness.

I have seen the most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry.

Alexander, the tyrant of Pheres, durst not be a spectator of tragedies in the theatre, for fear lest his citizens should see him weep at the misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache, who himself without pity caused so many people every day to be murdered.

and we do him the kindest office of life, which is to make him die insensibly, and soon: we are afterwards to hide ourselves, and to shift and fly from the officers of justice, who pursue us, whilst he is at rest.

Killing is good to frustrate an offence to come, not to revenge one that is already past; and more an act of fear than of bravery; of precaution than of courage; of defence than of enterprise.

It is manifest that by it we lose both the true end of revenge and the care of our reputation; we are afraid, if he lives he will do us another injury as great as the first;

He who stays to see the author die, whose writings he intends to question, what does he say but that he is weak in his aggressiveness?

It was told to Aristotle that some one had spoken ill of him: “Let him do more,” said he; “let him whip me too, provided I am not there.”

Our fathers contented themselves with revenging an insult with the lie, the lie with a box of the ear, and so forward;

if long, they are not then so painful as they desire; and thus plague themselves in choice of the greatest cruelty. Of this we have a thousand examples in antiquity, and I know not whether we, unawares, do not retain some traces of this barbarity.

All that exceeds a simple death appears to me absolute cruelty.

Our justice cannot expect that he, whom the fear of dying by being beheaded or hanged will not restrain, should be any more awed by the imagination of a languishing fire, pincers, or the wheel.

And Philopaemen, to those who extolled King Ptolemy for every day inuring his person to the exercise of arms: “It is not,” said he, “commendable in a king of his age to exercise himself in these things; he ought now really to employ them.”

The young are to make their preparations, the old to enjoy them, say the sages: and the greatest vice they observe in us is that our desires incessantly grow young again; we are always re-beginning to live.

Our studies and desires should sometime be sensible of age; yet we have one foot in the grave and still our appetites and pursuits spring every day anew within us:

‘Tis indeed the only comfort I find in my old age, that it mortifies in me several cares and desires wherewith my life has been disturbed; the care how the world goes, the care of riches, of grandeur, of knowledge, of health, of myself.

There are men who are learning to speak at a time when they should learn to be silent for ever.

A man may always study, but he must not always go to school what a contemptible thing is an old Abecedarian!—[Seneca, Ep. 36]

but, as a man whose sleeps were never disturbed in the importance of such a deliberation, he also, without choice or change, continued his studies with the other accustomary actions of his life.

The night that he was denied the praetorship he spent in play; that wherein he was to die he spent in reading.

The loss either of life or of office was all one to him.

and it is to be believed that this figure which astonishes us has relation to some other figure of the same kind unknown to man. From His all wisdom nothing but good, common; and regular proceeds; but we do not discern the disposition and relation:

Whatever falls out contrary to custom we say is contrary to nature, but nothing, whatever it be, is contrary to her.

Let, therefore, this universal and natural reason expel the error and astonishment that novelty brings along with it.

… and terrible voice, very often against those that are but newly come from nurse, and there they are lamed and spoiled with blows, whilst our justice takes no cognisance of it, as if these maims and dislocations were not executed upon members of our commonwealth:

There is no passion that so much transports men from their right judgment as anger.

No one would demur upon punishing a judge with death who should condemn a criminal on the account of his own choler; why, then, should fathers and pedagogues be any more allowed to whip and chastise children in their anger?

No one would demur upon punishing a judge with death who should condemn a criminal on the account of his own choler; why, then, should fathers and pedagogues be any more allowed to whip and chastise children in their anger?

‘Tis then no longer correction, but revenge.

Chastisement is instead of physic to children; and would we endure a physician who should be animated against and enraged at his patient?

We ourselves, to do well, should never lay a hand upon our servants whilst our anger lasts. When the pulse beats, and we feel emotion in ourselves, let us defer the business; things will indeed appear otherwise to us when we are calm and cool.

‘Tis passion that then commands, ‘tis passion that speaks, and not we.

Faults seen through passion appear much greater to us than they really are, as bodies do when seen through a mist. He who is hungry uses meat; but he who will make use of chastisement should have neither hunger nor thirst to it.

When the pulse beats, and we feel emotion in ourselves, let us defer the business; things will indeed appear otherwise to us when we are calm and cool. ‘Tis passion that then commands, ‘tis passion that speaks, and not we.

Faults seen through passion appear much greater to us than they really are, as bodies do when seen through a mist.

He who is hungry uses meat; but he who will make use of chastisement should have neither hunger nor thirst to it. And, moreover, chastisements that are inflicted with weight and discretion are much better received and with greater benefit by him who suffers;

Suetonius reports that Caius Rabirius having been condemned by Caesar, the thing that most prevailed upon the people (to whom he had appealed) to determine the cause in his favour, was the animosity and vehemence that Caesar had manifested in that sentence.

Saying is a different thing from doing; we are to consider the sermon apart and the preacher apart.

These men lent themselves to a pretty business who in our times have attempted to shake the truth of our Church by the vices of her ministers; she extracts her testimony elsewhere;

“I should,” said he to him, “do the same if it were a swallow that spoke of this subject; but if it were an eagle I should willingly hear him.”

I perceive, methinks, in the writings of the ancients, that he who speaks what he thinks, strikes much more home than he who only feigns.

Hear Cicero speak of the love of liberty: hear Brutus speak of it, the mere written words of this man sound as if he would purchase it at the price of his life. Let Cicero, the father of eloquence, treat of the contempt of death;

am I red, do I foam, does any word escape my lips I ought to repent? Do I start? Do I tremble with fury? For those, I tell thee, are the true signs of anger.” And so, turning to the fellow that was whipping him,

“Ply on thy work,” said he, “whilst this gentleman and I dispute.”

This is his story.

and to one who supped in his company, a man of a gentle and sweet conversation, and who, that he might not move him, approved and consented to all he said; he, impatient that his ill-humour should thus spend itself without aliment:

“For the love of the gods deny me something,” said he, “that we may be two.”

Women, in like manner, are only angry that others may be angry again, in imitation of the laws of love.

which he having accordingly done, and the storm blown over, without any mention of this disturbance, he proceeded in his discourse where he had left off before.

No answer can nettle a man like such a contempt.

Of the most choleric man in France (anger is always an imperfection, but more excusable in, a soldier, for in that trade it cannot sometimes be avoided) I often say, that he is the most patient man that I know, and the most discreet in …

A man incorporates anger by concealing it, as Diogenes told Demosthenes, who, for fear of being seen in a tavern, withdrew himself the more retiredly into it:

“The more you retire backward, the farther you enter in.”

I would rather advise that a man should give his servant a box of the ear a little unseasonably, than rack his fancy to present this grave and composed countenance; and had rather discover my passions than brood over them at my own expense;

… lousy knave, and who being plunged over head and ears in water, yet lifted her hands above her head and made a sign of cracking lice, feigned a tale of which, in truth, we every day see a manifest image in the obstinacy of women.

And obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigour and stability.

We are not to judge what is possible and what is not, according to what is credible and incredible to our apprehension, as I have said elsewhere and it is a great fault, and yet one that most men are guilty of, which, nevertheless, I …

… elsewhere and it is a great fault, and yet one that most men are guilty of, which, nevertheless, I do not mention with any reflection upon Bodin, to make a difficulty of believing that in another which they could not or would not do themselves.

Every one thinks that the sovereign stamp of human nature is imprinted in him, and that from it all others must take their rule; and that all proceedings which are not like his are feigned and false.

Is anything of another’s actions or faculties proposed to him? the first thing he calls to the consultation of his judgment is his own example;

Another time he caused his baker to be whipped for serving him with a finer than ordinary sort of bread.

Cato himself was wont to say of him, that he was the first sober man who ever made it his business to ruin his country.

And as to the same Cato’s calling, him one day drunkard, it fell out thus being both of them in the Senate, at a time when Catiline’s conspiracy was in question of which was Caesar was suspected, one came and brought him a letter sealed …

As to what concerns his justice, he put a beloved servant of his to death for lying with a noble Roman’s wife, though there was no complaint made.

Never had man more moderation in his victory, nor more resolution in his adverse fortune.

But all these good inclinations were stifled and spoiled by his furious ambition, by which he suffered himself to be so transported and misled that one may easily maintain that this passion was the rudder of all his actions;

They who retire themselves from the common offices, from that infinite number of troublesome rules that fetter a man of exact honesty in civil life, are in my opinion very discreet, what peculiar sharpness of constraint soever they impose upon themselves in so doing.

‘Tis in some sort a kind of dying to avoid the pain of living well.

They may have another reward; but the reward of difficulty I fancy they can never have;

This mystery is not for my palate; ‘tis to much purpose that they scratch themselves and tear their hair. I whisper in a waiting-woman’s or secretary’s ear: “How were they, how did they live together?” I always have that good saying m my head:

Their whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead.

We should willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead, provided they will smile upon us whilst we are alive.

Their whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead. We should willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead, provided they will smile upon us whilst we are alive.

Is it not enough to make a man revive in pure spite, that she, who spat in my face whilst I was in being, shall come to kiss my feet when I am no more?

If there be any honour in lamenting a husband, it only appertains to those who smiled upon them whilst they had them; let those who wept during their lives laugh at their deaths, as well outwardly as within.

Their whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead.

We should willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead, provided they will smile upon us whilst we are alive.

Is it not enough to make a man revive in pure spite, that she, who spat in my face whilst I was in being, shall come to kiss my feet when I am no more?

Therefore, never regard those blubbered eyes and that pitiful voice; consider her deportment, her complexion, the plumpness of her cheeks under all those formal veils; ‘tis there she talks plain French.

There are few who do not mend upon’t, and health is a quality that cannot lie.

That starched and ceremonious countenance looks not so much back as forward, and is rather intended to get a new husband than to lament the old.

Besides what glory can be compared to his? Nothing is so frequent in men’s mouths as his name and works, nothing so known and received as Troy, Helen, and the war about her, when perhaps there was never any such thing.

Our children are still called by names that he invented above three thousand years ago; who does not know Hector and Achilles?

Not only some particular families, but most nations also seek their origin in his inventions.

And Tamerlane, with a foolish humanity, palliated the fantastic cruelty he exercised upon lepers, when he put all he could hear of to death, to deliver them, as he pretended, from the painful life they lived.

For there was not one of them who would not rather have been thrice a leper than be not.

And Antisthenes the Stoic, being very sick, and crying out, “Who will deliver me from these evils?”

provided the courage be undaunted, and the tones not expressive of despair, let her be satisfied.

What matter the wringing of our hands, if we do not wring our thoughts?

She forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem; let her be satisfied with governing our understanding, which she has taken upon her the care of instructing;

Let us not command this voice to sally, but stop it not. Epicurus, not only forgives his sage for crying out in torments, but advises him to it:

We have enough to do to deal with the disease, without troubling ourselves with these superfluous rules.

Which I say in excuse of those whom we ordinarily see impatient in the assaults of this malady; for as to what concerns myself, I have passed it over hitherto with a little better countenance, and contented myself with groaning without roaring out;

And is not this an express and very advantageous experience. I do not know that they can find me in all their records three that were born, bred, and died under the same roof, who have lived so long by their conduct.

They must here of necessity confess, that if reason be not, fortune at least is on my side, and with physicians fortune goes a great deal further than reason.

Let them not take me now at a disadvantage; let them not threaten me in the subdued condition wherein I now am; that were treachery. In truth, I have enough the better of them by these domestic examples, that they should rest satisfied.

In the first place, experience makes me dread it; for amongst all my acquaintance, I see no people so soon sick, and so long before they are well, as those who take much physic; their very health is altered and corrupted by their frequent prescriptions.

Physicians are not content to deal only with the sick, but they will moreover corrupt health itself, for fear men should at any time escape their authority.

Do they not, from a continual and perfect health, draw the argument of some great sickness to ensue?

… and the disease are ever to our loss, since the combat is fought within ourselves, and that the drug is an assistant not to be trusted, being in its own nature an enemy to our health, and by trouble having only access into our condition.

Let it alone a little; the general order of things that takes care of fleas and moles, also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself.

‘Tis to much purpose we cry out “Bihore,”—[A term used by the Languedoc waggoners to hasten their horses]—‘tis a way to make us hoarse, but not to hasten the matter. ‘Tis a proud and uncompassionate order:

Let us, in God’s name, follow it; it leads those that follow, and those who will not follow, it drags along, both their fury and physic together.

Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.

One asking a Lacedaemonian what had made him live so long, he made answer, “the ignorance of physic”; and the Emperor Adrian continually exclaimed as he was dying, that the crowd of physicians had killed him. A bad wrestler turned physician:

and the Emperor Adrian continually exclaimed as he was dying, that the crowd of physicians had killed him. A bad wrestler turned physician: “Courage,” says Diogenes to him; “thou hast done well, for now thou will throw those who have formerly thrown thee.”

But they have this advantage, according to Nicocles, that the sun gives light to their success and the earth covers their failures.

And, besides, they have a very advantageous way of making use of all sorts of events:

he, whom from an ordinary cold they have thrown into a double tertian-ague, had but for them been in a continued fever.

They do not much care what mischief they do, since it turns to their own profit.

In earnest, they have reason to require a very favourable belief from their patients; and, indeed, it ought to be a very easy one, to swallow things so hard to be believed.

In earnest, they have reason to require a very favourable belief from their patients; and, indeed, it ought to be a very easy one, to swallow things so hard to be believed.

Plato said very well, that physicians were the only men who might lie at pleasure, since our health depends upon the vanity and falsity of their promises.

AEsop, a most excellent author, and of whom few men discover all the graces, pleasantly represents to us the tyrannical authority physicians usurp over poor creatures, weakened and subdued by sickness and fear, when he tells us, that a sick person, being asked by his …

and his followers be pardoned, who send so many souls from life to death?

A physician, boasting to Nicocles that his art was of great authority: “It is so, indeed,” said Nicocles, “that can with impunity kill so many people.”

As to what remains, had I been of their counsel, I would have rendered my discipline more sacred and mysterious; they begun well, but they have not ended so.

I do not attack them; ‘tis their art I inveigh against, and do not much blame them for making their advantage of our folly, for most men do the same.

Many callings, both of greater and of less dignity than theirs, have no other foundation or support than public abuse.

When I am sick I send for them if they be near, only to have their company, and pay them as others do.

and yet most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit; for I hear them find fault and complain as well as we; but they resolve at last, “What should I do then?”

As if impatience were of itself a better remedy than patience.

Is there any one of those who have suffered themselves to be persuaded into this miserable subjection, who does not equally surrender himself to all sorts of impostures?

He who has anything of value in him, let him make it appear in his conduct, in his ordinary discourses, in his courtships, and his quarrels: in play, in bed, at table, in the management of his affairs, in his economics.

Those whom I see make good books in ill breeches, should first have mended their breeches, if they would have been ruled by me.

Ask a Spartan whether he had rather be a good orator or a good soldier: and if I was asked the same question, I would rather choose to be a good cook, had I not one already to serve me. My God!

For besides that this dead and mute painting will take from my natural being, it has no resemblance to my better condition, but is much lapsed from my former vigour and cheerfulness, growing faded and withered:

I am towards the bottom of the barrel, which begins to taste of the lees.

“As to the rest, Madame, I should not have dared to make so bold with the mysteries of physic, considering the esteem that you and so many others have of it, had I not had encouragement from their own authors.

Such as I am, I will be elsewhere than in paper: my art and industry have been ever directed to render myself good for something; my studies, to teach me to do, and not to write.

I have made it my whole business to frame my life: this has been my trade and my work; I am less a writer of books than anything else.

I have coveted understanding for the service of my present and real conveniences, and not to lay up a stock for my posterity.

… (the most general way that nature has followed being variety, and more in souls than bodies, forasmuch as they are of a more supple substance, and more susceptible of forms) I find it much more rare to see our humours and designs jump and agree.

And there never were, in the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains: their most universal quality is diversity.

No man is free from speaking foolish things; but the worst on’t is, when a man labours to play the fool:

And there never were, in the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains: their most universal quality is diversity.

No man is free from speaking foolish things; but the worst on’t is, when a man labours to play the fool:

This does not concern me; mine slip from me with as little care as they are of little value, and ‘tis the better for them.

we, who are weaker, take upon us parts both that are more easy and less hazardous.

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre; let us leave this commission to men who are more obedient and more supple.

In earnest, I have often been troubled to see judges, by fraud and false hopes of favour or pardon, allure a criminal to confess his fact, and therein to make use of cozenage and impudence.

All legitimate intentions are temperate and equable of themselves; if otherwise, they degenerate into seditious and unlawful.

This is it which makes me walk everywhere with my head erect, my face and my heart open.

In truth, and I am not afraid to confess it, I should easily, in case of need, hold up one candle to St. Michael and another to his dragon, like the old woman;

The secrets of princes are a troublesome burthen to such as are not interested in them. I very willingly bargain that they trust me with little, but confidently rely upon what I tell them. I have ever known more than I desired.

One open way of speaking introduces another open way of speaking, and draws out discoveries, like wine and love.

Philippides, in my opinion, answered King Lysimachus very discreetly, who, asking him what of his estate he should bestow upon him? “What you will,” said he, “provided it be none of your secrets.”

… there is no rule in their school that could match this natural motion, and maintain an appearance of liberty and licence, so equal and inflexible, through so many various and crooked paths, and that all their wit and endeavour could never have led them through.

The way of truth is one and simple; that of particular profit, and the commodity of affairs a man is entrusted with, is double, unequal, and casual.

I have often seen these counterfeit and artificial liberties practised, but, for the most part, without success; they relish of AEsop’s ass who, in emulation of the dog, obligingly clapped his two fore-feet upon his master’s shoulders;

‘Tis a counterpart of various and changeable accidents, and of irresolute imaginations, and, as it falls out, sometimes contrary: whether it be that I am then another self, or that I take subjects by other circumstances and considerations: so it is that

I may peradventure contradict myself, but, as Demades said, I never contradict the truth.

Could my soul once take footing, I would not essay but resolve: but it is always learning and making trial.

Even constancy itself is no other but a slower and more languishing motion. I cannot fix my object; ‘tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness;

I take it as it is at the instant I consider it; I do not paint its being, I paint its passage;

not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute, I must accommodate my history to the hour:

To perfect it, I need bring nothing but fidelity to the work; and that is there, and the most pure and sincere that is anywhere to be found.

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

for, methinks, custom allows to age more liberty of prating, and more indiscretion of talking of a man’s self. That cannot fall out here, which I often see elsewhere, that the work and the artificer contradict one another:

every man carries the entire form of human condition. Authors communicate themselves to the people by some especial and extrinsic mark; I, the first of any, by my universal being; as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian, a poet, or a lawyer.

If the world find fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves.

But is it reason that, being so particular in my way of living, I should pretend to recommend myself to the public knowledge?

always adding this clause, not one of ceremony, but a true and real submission, that I speak inquiring and doubting, purely and simply referring myself to the common and accepted beliefs for the resolution.

I do not teach; I only relate.

There is no vice that is absolutely a vice which does not offend, and that a sound judgment does not accuse;

so hard is it to imagine that a man can know without abhorring it. Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.

Vice leaves repentance in the soul, like an ulcer in the flesh, which is always scratching and lacerating itself:

for reason effaces all other grief and sorrows, but it begets that of repentance, which is so much the more grievous, by reason it springs within, as the cold and heat of fevers are more sharp than those that only strike upon the outward skin.

The shortest way to arrive at glory, would be to do that for conscience which we do for glory: and the virtue of Alexander appears to me of much less vigour in his great theatre, than that of Socrates in his mean and obscure employment.

I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander, but Alexander in that of Socrates, I cannot.

Who shall ask the one what he can do, he will answer, “Subdue the world”: and who shall put the same question to the other, he will say, “Carry on human life conformably with its natural condition”;

‘Tis an exact life that maintains itself in due order in private.

Every one may juggle his part, and represent an honest man upon the stage: but within, and in his own bosom, where all may do as they list, where all is concealed, to be regular, there’s the point.

The next degree is to be so in his house, and in his ordinary actions, for which we are accountable to none, and where there is no study nor artifice. And therefore Bias, setting forth the excellent state of a private family, says:

a much more general, weighty, and legitimate science than the other.—[Montaigne added here, “To do for the world that for which he came into the world,” but he afterwards erased these words from the manuscript.—Naigeon.]

The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity.

As they who judge and try us within, make no great account of the lustre of our public actions, and see they are only streaks and rays of clear water springing from a slimy and muddy bottom so, likewise, they who judge of us by …

I do not discern that in itself it judges anything otherwise now than it formerly did, nor that it has acquired any new light: wherefore, if there be convalescence, ‘tis an enchanted one.

Miserable kind of remedy, to owe one’s health to one’s disease!

Tis not that our misfortune should perform this office, but the good fortune of our judgment. I am not to be made to do anything by persecutions and afflictions, but to curse them: that is, for people who cannot be roused but by a whip.

nor would I have this wretched remainder give the lie to the pleasant, sound, and long part of my life: I would present myself uniformly throughout.

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

and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that I am without. ‘Tis one main obligation I have to my fortune, that the succession of my bodily estate has been carried on according to the natural seasons;

Besides a foolish and feeble pride, an impertinent prating, froward and insociable humours, superstition, and a ridiculous desire of riches when we have lost the use of them, I find there more envy, injustice, and malice.

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face; and souls are never, or very rarely seen, that, in growing old, do not smell sour and musty.

Man moves all together, both towards his perfection and decay.

Meditation is a powerful and full study to such as can effectually taste and employ themselves;

I had rather fashion my soul than furnish it.

There is no employment, either more weak or more strong, than that of entertaining a man’s own thoughts, according as the soul is; the greatest men make it their whole business,

In the experience and practice of this maxim, which is a very true one, consists all the benefit I reap from books. As a matter of fact, I make no more use of them, as it were, than those who know them not.

I enjoy them as misers do their money, in knowing that I may enjoy them when I please: my mind is satisfied with this right of possession.

I never travel without books, either in peace or war; and yet sometimes I pass over several days, and sometimes months, without looking on them. I will read by-and-by, say I to myself, or to-morrow, or when I please;

‘Tis there that I am in my kingdom, and there I endeavour to make myself an absolute monarch, and to sequester this one corner from all society, conjugal, filial, and civil; elsewhere I have but verbal authority only, and of a confused essence.

That man, in my opinion, is very miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself, where to entertain himself alone, or to conceal himself from others.

Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping them always in show, like the statue of a public, square:

but death is honourable; therefore death is no evil”; against drunkenness this: “No one commits his secrets to a drunkard; but every one commits his secrets to a wise man: therefore a wise man is no drunkard.” Is this to hit the white?

I love to see that these great and leading souls cannot rid themselves of our company: perfect men as they are, they are yet simply men.

Revenge is a sweet passion, of great and natural impression; I discern it well enough, though I have no manner of experience of it.

‘Tis in everything else the same; a violent imagination hath seized me: I find it a nearer way to change than to subdue it: I depute, if not one contrary, yet another at least, in its place.

Variation ever relieves, dissolves, and dissipates.

If I am not able to contend with it, I escape from it; and in avoiding it, slip out of the way, and make, my doubles;

this is precisely to cut out and make up a shoe for another to draw on.

A little thing will turn and divert us, because a little thing holds us.

We do not much consider subjects in gross and singly; they are little and superficial circumstances, or images that touch us, and the outward useless rinds that peel off from the subjects themselves:

a dog, a horse, a book, a glass, and what not, were considered in my loss; to others their ambitious hopes, their money, their knowledge, not less foolish considerations in my opinion than mine.

I look upon death carelessly when I look upon it universally as the end of life. I insult over it in gross, but in detail it domineers over me:

the tears of a footman, the disposing of my clothes, the touch of a friendly hand, a common consolation, discourages and softens me. So do the complaints in tragedies agitate our souls with grief;

I gently turn aside, and avert my eyes from the stormy and cloudy sky I have before me, which, thanks be to God, I regard without fear, but not without meditation and study, and amuse myself in the remembrance of my better years:

Let childhood look forward and age backward; was not this the signification of Janus’ double face?

Let years draw me along if they will, but it shall be backward; as long as my eyes can discern the pleasant season expired, I shall now and then turn them that way;

I was formerly wont to mark cloudy and gloomy days as extraordinary; these are now my ordinary days; the extraordinary are the clear and bright;

I am ready to leap for joy, as for an unwonted favour, when nothing happens me.

Let me tickle myself, I cannot force a poor smile from this wretched body of mine; I am only merry in conceit and in dreaming, by artifice to divert the melancholy of age; but, in faith, it requires another remedy than a dream.

but, in faith, it requires another remedy than a dream. A weak contest of art against nature. ‘Tis great folly to lengthen and anticipate human incommodities, as every one does;

I had rather be a less while old than be old before I am really so

.’ I seize on even the least occasions of pleasure I can meet. I know very well, by hearsay, several sorts of prudent pleasures, effectually so, and glorious to boot; but opinion has not power enough over me to give me an appetite to them.

the laws themselves send us home. I can do no less in favour of this wretched condition into which my age has thrown me than furnish it with toys to play withal, as they do children; and, in truth, we become such.

Both wisdom and folly will have enough to do to support and relieve me by alternate services in this calamity of age:

I accordingly avoid the lightest punctures; and those that formerly would not have rippled the skin, now pierce me through and through: my habit of body is now so naturally declining to ill:

Let us, at least, whilst we have truce, drive away incommodities and difficulties from our commerce:

I love a gay and civil wisdom, and fly from all sourness and austerity of manners

, all repellent, mien being suspected by me:

Socrates had a constant countenance, but serene and smiling, not sourly austere, like the elder Crassus, whom no one ever saw laugh.

Virtue is a pleasant and gay quality.

I know very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings, who have not more to quarrel with in the licence of their own thoughts: I conform myself well enough to their inclinations, but I offend their eyes.

Every one is wary and discreet in confession, but men ought to be so in action; the boldness of doing ill is in some sort compensated and restrained by the boldness of confessing it.

Whoever will oblige himself to tell all, should oblige himself to do nothing that he must be forced to conceal.

I wish that this excessive licence of mine may draw men to freedom, above these timorous and mincing virtues sprung from our imperfections, and that at the expense of my immoderation I may reduce them to reason.

He who does all things for honour and glory, what can he think to gain by shewing himself to the world in a vizor, and by concealing his true being from the people?

Praise a humpback for his stature, he has reason to take it for an affront:

if you are a coward, and men commend you for your valour, is it of you they speak? They take you for another.

They who do not rightly know themselves, may feed themselves with false approbations; not I, who see myself, and who examine myself even to my very bowels, and who very well know what is my due.

I am content to be less commended, provided I am better known.

I may be reputed a wise man in such a sort of wisdom as I take to be folly. I am vexed that my Essays only serve the ladies for a common piece of furniture, and a piece for the hall;

And that so few are observed to be happy, is a token of its price and value. If well formed and rightly taken, ‘tis the best of all human societies; we cannot live without it, and yet we do nothing but decry it.

It happens, as with cages, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

Socrates being asked, whether it was more commodious to take a wife or not, “Let a man take which course he will,” said he; “he will repent.” ‘Tis a contract to which the common saying:

It is found nowadays more convenient for simple and plebeian souls, where delights, curiosity, and idleness do not so much disturb it; but extravagant humours, such as mine, that hate all sorts of obligation and restraint, are not so proper for it:

Might I have had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would have had me.

But ‘tis to much purpose to evade it; the common custom and usance of life will have it so. The most of my actions are guided by example, not by choice, and yet I did not go to it of my own voluntary motion;

There is no doing more difficult than that not doing, nor more active:

I hold it more easy to carry a suit of armour all the days of one’s life than a maidenhead;

and the vow of virginity of all others is the most noble, as being the hardest to keep:

and, on the other side, leaves us to accuse and avoid it, as insolent and indecent, to blush at it, and to recommend abstinence.

Are we not brutes to call that work brutish which begets us?

People of so many differing religions have concurred in several proprieties, as sacrifices, lamps, burning incense, fasts, and offerings; and amongst others, in the condemning this act: all opinions tend that way, besides the widespread custom of circumcision, which may be regarded as a punishment.

‘Tis said, that Zeno never had to do with a woman but once in his life, and then out of civility, that he might not seem too obstinately to disdain the sex.

Every one avoids seeing a man born, every one runs to see him die;

to destroy him a spacious field is sought out in the face of the sun, but, to make him, we creep into as dark and private a corner as we can: ‘tis a man’s duty to withdraw himself bashfully from the light to create;

who cut and mangle their faces and limbs; who never speak to any one: fanatic people who think to honour their nature by disnaturing themselves; who value themselves upon their contempt of themselves, and purport to grow better by being worse.

What monstrous animal is this, that is a horror to himself, to whom his delights are grievous, and who weds himself to misfortune?

There are people who conceal their life:

who avoid health and cheerfulness, as dangerous and prejudicial qualities. Not only many sects, but many peoples, curse their birth, and bless their death; and there is a place where the sun is abominated and darkness adored.

We are only ingenious in using ourselves ill: ‘tis the real quarry our intellects fly at; and intellect, when misapplied, is a dangerous tool!

Alas, poor man! thou hast enough inconveniences that are inevitable, without increasing them by throe own invention; and art miserable enough by nature, without being so by art; thou hast real and essential deformities enough, without forging those that are imaginary.

… of Greece, was so in love with his passion that, having, gained a mistress’s consent, he refused to enjoy her, that he might not by fruition quench and stupefy the unquiet ardour of which he was so proud, and with which he so fed himself.

Dearness is a good sauce to meat:

do but observe how much the manner of salutation, particular to our nation, has, by its facilities, made kisses, which Socrates says are so powerful and dangerous for the stealing of hearts, of no esteem.

it were a useful decency of our maidenly modesty, could it keep him from this discovery. In fine, whoever could reclaim man from so scrupulous a verbal superstition, would do the world no great disservice.

Our life is divided betwixt folly and prudence: whoever will write of it but what is reverend and canonical, will leave above the one-half behind.

I do not excuse myself to myself; and if I did, it should rather be for my excuses that I would excuse myself than for any other fault;

So that merely the accidental touch, and of a shoulder, heated and altered a soul cooled and enerved by age, and the strictest liver of all mankind. And, pray, why not?

Socrates was a man, and would neither be, nor seem, any other thing.

Philosophy does not contend against natural pleasures, provided they be moderate, and only preaches moderation, not a total abstinence; the power of its resistance is employed against those that are adulterate and strange.

So that merely the accidental touch, and of a shoulder, heated and altered a soul cooled and enerved by age, and the strictest liver of all mankind. And, pray, why not? Socrates was a man, and would neither be, nor seem, any other thing.

Philosophy does not contend against natural pleasures, provided they be moderate, and only preaches moderation, not a total abstinence;

the power of its resistance is employed against those that are adulterate and strange. Philosophy says that the appetites of the body ought not to be augmented by the mind, and ingeniously warns us not to stir up hunger by saturity;

To conclude this notable commentary, which has escaped from me in a torrent of babble, a torrent sometimes impetuous and hurtful,

I say that males and females are cast in the same mould, and that, education and usage excepted, the difference is not great.

Plato indifferently invites both the one and the other to the society of all studies, exercises, and vocations, both military and civil, in his Commonwealth; and the philosopher Antisthenes rejected all distinction betwixt their virtue and ours.

I was never afraid upon the water, nor indeed in any other peril (and I have had enough before my eyes that would have sufficed, if death be one), so as to be astounded to lose my judgment.

Fear springs sometimes as much from want of judgment as from want of courage.

All the dangers I have been in I have looked upon without winking, with an open, sound, and entire sight; and, indeed, a man must have courage to fear.

by which means the first that should rout me would keep me from ever rallying again. I have no after-game to play: on which side soever the inundation breaks my banks, I lie open, and am drowned without remedy.

Epicurus says, that a wise man can never become a fool; I have an opinion reverse to this sentence, which is, that he who has once been a very fool, will never after be very wise.

God grants me cold according to my cloth, and passions proportionable to the means I have to withstand them: nature having laid me open on the one side, has covered me on the other;

Who ever enhanced the price of merchandise at such a rate?

So many cities levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic of pearl and pepper?

Mechanic victories! Never did ambition, never did public animosities, engage men against one another in such miserable hostilities, in such miserable calamities.

and have made it appear, in the whole conduct of my life and enterprises, that I have rather avoided than otherwise the climbing above the degree of fortune wherein God has placed me by my birth; all natural constitution is equally just and easy.

My soul is such a poltroon, that I measure not good fortune by the height, but by the facility.

But if my heart be not great enough, ‘tis open enough to make amends, at any one’s request, freely to lay open its weakness. Should any one put me upon comparing the life of L.

Who does not participate in the hazard and difficulty, can claim no interest in the honour and pleasure that are the consequents of hazardous actions.

‘Tis pity a man should be so potent that all things must give way to him; fortune therein sets you too remote from society, and places you in too great a solitude.

This easiness and mean facility of making all things bow under you, is an enemy to all sorts of pleasure: ‘tis to slide, not to go; ‘tis to sleep, and not to live. Conceive man accompanied with omnipotence: you overwhelm him;

and Pausanias tells us of an ancient player upon the harp, who was wont to make his scholars go to hear one who played very ill, who lived over against him, that they might learn to hate his discords and false measures.

The horror of cruelty more inclines me to clemency, than any example of clemency could possibly do.

A good rider does not so much mend my seat, as an awkward attorney or a Venetian, on horseback; and a clownish way of speaking more reforms mine than the most correct. The ridiculous and simple look of another always warns and advises me;

The Athenians, and also the Romans, kept this exercise in great honour in their academies; the Italians retain some traces of it to this day, to their great advantage, as is manifest by the comparison of our understandings with theirs.

The study of books is a languishing and feeble motion that heats not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises at once.

If I converse with a strong mind and a rough disputant, he presses upon my flanks, and pricks me right and left; his imaginations stir up mine; jealousy, glory, and contention, stimulate and raise me up to something above myself;

a friendship that pleases itself in the sharpness and vigour of its communication, like love in biting and scratching: it is not vigorous and generous enough, if it be not quarrelsome, if it be civilised and artificial, if it treads nicely and fears the shock:

When any one contradicts me, he raises my attention, not my anger

: I advance towards him who controverts, who instructs me; the cause of truth ought to be the common cause both of the one and the other. What will the angry man answer? Passion has already confounded his judgment;

Is there more noise or confusion in the scolding of herring-wives than in the public disputes of men of this profession?

I had rather my son should learn in a tap-house to speak, than in the schools to prate.

Take a master of arts, and confer with him: why does he not make us sensible of this artificial excellence?

it belongs to a greater power to possess it. It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine knowledge.

The world is but a school of inquisition: it is not who shall enter the ring, but who shall run the best courses.

He may as well play the fool who speaks true, as he who speaks false, for we are upon the manner, not the matter, of speaking.

How many ridiculous things, in my own opinion, do I say and answer every day that comes over my head? and then how many more, according to the opinion of others? If I bite my own lips, what ought others to do?

In fine, we must live amongst the living, and let the river run under the bridge without our care, or, at least, without our interference.

In truth, why do we meet a man with a hunch-back, or any other deformity, without being moved, and cannot endure the encounter of a deformed mind without being angry? this vicious sourness sticks more to the judge than to the crime.

Do princes satisfy themselves with so little? Truly, we were in good hands.” This is a thing that I have often seen in my time. Nay, even the very disguise of grandeur represented in our comedies in some sort moves and gulls us.

That which I myself adore in kings is the crowd of their adorers; all reverence and submission are due to them, except that of the understanding: my reason is not obliged to bow and bend; my knees are.

Melanthius being asked what he thought of the tragedy of Dionysius, “I could not see it,” said he, “it was so clouded with language”;

And moreover, for the most part, this arrogance of speech and gaiety of countenance gives them the better of it in the opinion of the audience, which is commonly weak and incapable of well judging and discerning the real advantage.

Obstinacy of opinion and heat in argument are the surest proofs of folly; is there anything so assured, resolute, disdainful, contemplative, serious and grave as the ass?

May we not include under the title of conference and communication the quick and sharp repartees which mirth and familiarity introduce amongst friends, pleasantly and wittily jesting and rallying with one another?

There are other jeux de main,—[practical jokes]—rude and indiscreet, after the French manner, that I mortally hate; my skin is very tender and sensible: I have in my time seen two princes of the blood buried upon that very account.

‘Tis unhandsome to fight in play.

As to the rest, when I have a mind to judge of any one, I ask him how far he is contented with himself; to what degree his speaking or his work pleases him.

but I let them go at a venture. I see that others get reputation by such things: ‘tis not for me alone to judge.

I present myself standing and lying, before and behind, my right side and my left, and, in all my natural postures.

Wits, though equal in force, are not always equal in taste and application.

This is what my memory presents to me in gross, and with uncertainty enough; all judgments in gross are weak and imperfect.

There is, peradventure, no more manifest vanity than to write of it so vainly.

That which divinity has so divinely expressed to us—[“Vanity of vanities: all is vanity.”—Eccles., i. 2.]—ought to be carefully and continually meditated by men of understanding.

What, then, ought prating to produce, since prattling and the first beginning to speak, stuffed the world with such a horrible load of volumes?

So many words for words only.

O Pythagoras, why didst not thou allay this tempest? They accused one Galba of old for living idly; he made answer, “That every one ought to give account of his actions, but not of his home.”

and the tricks that they most conceal from me, are those that I the soonest come to know; some there are that, not to make matters worse, a man must himself help to conceal.

Vain vexations; vain sometimes, but always vexations.

The smallest and slightest impediments are the most piercing: and as little letters most tire the eyes, so do little affairs most disturb us. The rout of little ills more offend than one, how great soever.

If I have therein more perspicacity than the vulgar, I have also more patience; in short, they weigh with me, if they do not hurt me.

Life is a tender thing, and easily molested.

Since my age has made me grow more pensive and morose,

‘Tis a miserable thing to be in a place where everything you see employs and concerns you; and I fancy that I more cheerfully enjoy the pleasures of another man’s house, and with greater and a purer relish, than those of my own.

Diogenes answered according to my humour him who asked him what sort of wine he liked the best: “That of another,” said he.

—[Diogenes Laertius, vi. 54.]

‘tis the gleaner’s portion. After all, I do not so much value the fidelity of my people as I contemn their injury.

What a mean and ridiculous thing it is for a man to study his money, to delight in handling and telling it over and over again!

‘Tis by this avarice makes its approaches.

What would I not rather do than read a contract? or than, as a slave to my own business, tumble over those dusty writings? or, which is worse, those of another man, as so many do nowadays, to get money?

I grudge nothing but care and trouble, and endeavour nothing so much, as to be careless and at ease.

I had been much fitter, I believe, could it have been without obligation and servitude, to have lived upon another man’s fortune than my own:

They were both variously great men, and certainly, according to the age, rare and great, each of them in his kind: but what destiny was it that placed them in these times, men so remote from and so disproportioned to our corruption and intestine tumults?

Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation: change only gives form to injustice and tyranny.

When any piece is loosened, it may be proper to stay it; one may take care that the alteration and corruption natural to all things do not carry us too far from our beginnings and principles:

it is the most horrible and tumultuous confusion that can be imagined; it endured it, notwithstanding, and therein continued, preserving not a monarchy limited within its own bounds, but so many nations so differing, so remote, so disaffected, so confusedly commanded, and so unjustly conquered:

Everything that totters does not fall.

The contexture of so great a body holds by more nails than one; it holds even by its antiquity, like old buildings, from which the foundations are worn away by time, without rough-cast or mortar, which yet live and support themselves by their own weight:

my understanding does not always go forward, it goes backward too. I do not much less suspect my fancies for being the second or the third, than for being the first, or present, or past; we often correct ourselves as foolishly as we do others.

I am grown older by a great many years since my first publications, which were in the year 1580; but I very much doubt whether I am grown an inch the wiser.

I now, and I anon, are two several persons; but whether better, I cannot determine. It were a fine thing to be old, if we only travelled towards improvement; but ‘tis a drunken, stumbling, reeling, infirm motion:

we often correct ourselves as foolishly as we do others. I am grown older by a great many years since my first publications, which were in the year 1580; but I very much doubt whether I am grown an inch the wiser.

I now, and I anon, are two several persons; but whether better, I cannot determine.

It were a fine thing to be old, if we only travelled towards improvement; but ‘tis a drunken, stumbling, reeling, infirm motion: like that of reeds, which the air casually waves to and fro at pleasure.

but I very much doubt whether I am grown an inch the wiser. I now, and I anon, are two several persons; but whether better, I cannot determine.

It were a fine thing to be old, if we only travelled towards improvement; but ‘tis a drunken, stumbling, reeling, infirm motion: like that of reeds, which the air casually waves to and fro at pleasure.

Antiochus had in his youth strongly written in favour of the Academy; in his old age he wrote as much against it; would not, which of these two soever I should follow, be still Antiochus?

Is it not reason that my conscience should be much more engaged when men simply rely upon it? In a bond, my faith owes nothing, because it has nothing lent it; let them trust to the security they have taken without me.

I had much rather break the wall of a prison and the laws themselves than my own word.

I am nice, even to superstition, in keeping my promises, and, therefore, upon all occasions have a care to make them uncertain and conditional. To those of no great moment, I add the jealousy of my own rule, to make them weight;

What I do owe is simply to foreign obligations and benefits; as to anything else, no man is more absolutely clear:

Princes give me a great deal if they take nothing from me; and do me good enough if they do me no harm; that’s all I ask from them.

O how am I obliged to God, that he has been pleased I should immediately receive from his bounty all I have, and specially reserved all my obligation to himself.

‘Tis what every one may do in himself, but more easily they whom God has placed in a condition exempt from natural and urgent necessities.

It is a wretched and dangerous thing to depend upon others; we ourselves, in whom is ever the most just and safest dependence, are not sufficiently sure.

I have nothing mine but myself, and yet the possession is, in part, defective and borrowed. I fortify myself both in courage, which is the strongest assistant, and also in fortune, therein wherewith to satisfy myself, though everything else should forsake me.

It is a wretched and dangerous thing to depend upon others; we ourselves, in whom is ever the most just and safest dependence, are not sufficiently sure.

I have nothing mine but myself, and yet the possession is, in part, defective and borrowed.

I fortify myself both in courage, which is the strongest assistant, and also in fortune, therein wherewith to satisfy myself, though everything else should forsake me.

an enemy in arms, than an enemy in a gown. Our fever has seized upon a body that is not much the worse for it; there was fire before, and now ‘tis broken out into a flame; the noise is greater, not the evil.

I ordinarily answer such as ask me the reason of my travels, “That I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek.”

If they tell me that there may be as little soundness amongst foreigners, and that their manners are no better than ours: I first reply, that it is hard to be believed;

And in these short and violent deaths, the consequence that I foresee administers more consolation to me than the effect does fear. They say, that as life is not better for being long, so death is better for being not long.

I do not so much evade being dead, as I enter into confidence with dying.

I wrap and shroud myself into the storm that is to blind and carry me away with the fury of a sudden and insensible attack.

I love her for herself, and more in her own native being, than in all the pomp of foreign and acquired embellishments.

I love her tenderly, even to her warts and blemishes.

I am a Frenchman only through this great city, great in people, great in the felicity of her situation; but, above all, great and incomparable in variety and diversity of commodities: the glory of France, and one of the most noble ornaments of the world.

I would fain know how it was that the Persians, so long ago and in the infancy of luxury, made ventilators where they wanted them, and planted shades, as Xenophon reports they did.

I love rain, and to dabble in the dirt, as well as ducks do.

The change of air and climate never touches me; every sky is alike; I am only troubled with inward alterations which I breed within myself, and those are not so frequent in travel.

“But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey.” What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me;

I only walk for the walk’s sake.

They who run after a benefit or a hare, run not; they only run who run at base, and to exercise their running. My design is divisible throughout: it is not grounded upon any great hopes: every day concludes my expectation:

quite contrary to the Roman superstition, where a man was looked upon as unhappy who died without speaking, and who had not his nearest relations to close his eyes.

I have enough to do to comfort myself, without having to console others

; thoughts enough in my head, not to need that circumstances should possess me with new; and matter enough to occupy me without borrowing. This affair is out of the part of society; ‘tis the act of one single person.

I should not, without fear, step out of my parish; I feel death always pinching me by the throat or by the back. But I am otherwise constituted; ‘tis in all places alike to me.

Yet, might I have my choice, I think I should rather choose to die on horseback than in bed; out of my own house, and far from my own people.

There is more heartbreaking than consolation in taking leave of one’s friends; I am willing to omit that civility, for that, of all the offices of friendship, is the only one that is unpleasant;

and the constancy which we commend in every one in supporting his adverse fortune, we accuse and reproach in our friends when the evil is our own; we are not satisfied that they should be sensible of our condition only, unless they be, moreover, afflicted.

A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief.

He who makes himself lamented without reason is a man not to be lamented when there shall be real cause: to be always complaining is the way never to be lamented;

Let the historians never trouble themselves with inquiring about me: I will tell them about it.”

A free and generous confession enervates reproach and disarms slander.

So it is that, one thing with another, I fancy men as often commend as undervalue me beyond reason; as, methinks also, from my childhood, in rank and degree of honour, they have given me a place rather above than below my right.

and if nothing be done, ‘tis as much as to say either that doubt hindered my choice (and sometimes ‘tis well chosen not to choose), or that I was positively resolved not to do anything at all.

I write my book for few men and for few years.

Had it been matter of duration, I should have put it into firmer language. According to the continual variation that ours has been subject to, up to this day, who can expect that its present form should be in use fifty years hence?

I leave nothing to be desired or to be guessed at concerning me.

If people must be talking of me, I would have it to be justly and truly;

I leave nothing to be desired or to be guessed at concerning me. If people must be talking of me, I would have it to be justly and truly;

I would come again, with all my heart, from the other world to give any one the lie who should report me other than I was, though he did it to honour me.

I perceive that people represent, even living men, quite another thing than what they really are; and had I not stoutly defended a friend whom I have lost,—[De la Boetie.]—they would have torn him into a thousand contrary pieces.

amongst those that are violent, I can worse endure to think of a precipice than of the fall of a house that will crush me in a moment, and of a wound with a sword than of a harquebus shot;

I should rather have chosen to poison myself with Socrates, than stab myself with Cato.

And, though it, be all one, yet my imagination makes as great a difference as betwixt death and life, betwixt throwing myself into a burning furnace and plunging into the channel of a river:

Do they meet with a compatriot in Hungary? O the happy chance! They are henceforward inseparable; they cling together, and their whole discourse is to condemn the barbarous manners they see about them.

Why barbarous, because they are not French?

And those have made the best use of their travels who have observed most to speak against. Most of them go for no other end but to come back again;

I have been at an infinite loss for such upon my travels. But such a companion should be chosen and acquired from your first setting out.

There can be no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind, that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to communicate it to:

This other has strained it one note higher:

I see the reason of this advice, and see it perfectly well; but he might sooner have done, and more pertinently, in bidding me in one word be wise; that resolution is beyond wisdom; ‘tis her precise work and product.

Thus the physician keeps preaching to a poor languishing patient to “be cheerful”; but he would advise him a little more discreetly in bidding him “be well.”

For my part, I am but a man of the common sort. ‘Tis a wholesome precept, certain and easy to be understood, “Be content with what you have,” that is to say, with reason:

I see often that we have theories of life set before us which neither the proposer nor those who hear him have any hope, nor, which is more, any inclination to follow.

Of the same sheet of paper whereon the judge has but just written a sentence against an adulterer, he steals a piece whereon to write a love-letter to his companion’s wife.

She whom you have but just now illicitly embraced will presently, even in your hearing, more loudly inveigh against the same fault in her companion than a Portia would do;—[The chaste daughter of Cato of Utica.]—and men there are who will condemn others to death …

good and strong stomachs serve themselves simply with the prescriptions of their own natural appetite; after this manner do our physicians proceed, who eat melons and drink iced wines, whilst they confine their patients to syrups and sops.

“I know not,” said the courtezan Lais, “what they may talk of books, wisdom, and philosophy; but these men knock as often at my door as any others.”

At the same rate that our licence carries us beyond what is lawful and allowed, men have, often beyond universal reason, stretched the precepts and rules of our life:

To whom does he prescribe that which he does not expect any one should perform? is he unjust in not doing what it is impossible for him to do?

The laws which condemn us not to be able, condemn us for not being able.

At the worst, this difform liberty of presenting ourselves two several ways, the actions after one manner and the reasoning after another, may be allowed to those who only speak of things;

but it cannot be allowed to those who speak of themselves, as I do:

I must march my pen as I do my feet.

Common life ought to have relation to the other lives: the virtue of Cato was vigorous beyond the reason of the age he lived in;

and says withal, that when he appoints his philosopher the head of a government, he does not mean a corrupt one like that of Athens, and much less such a one as this of ours, wherein wisdom itself would be to seek.

A good herb, transplanted into a soil contrary to its own nature, much sooner conforms itself to the soil than it reforms the soil to it.

I found that if I had wholly to apply myself to such employments, it would require a great deal of change and new modelling in me before I could be any way fit for it:

who can speak well in private, who would ill harangue a people or a prince; nay, ‘tis peradventure rather a testimony in him who can do the one that he cannot do the other, than otherwise.

I find that elevated souls are not much more proper for mean things than mean souls are for high ones.

Could it be imagined that Socrates should have administered occasion of laughter, at the expense of his own reputation, to the Athenians for: having never been able to sum up the votes of his tribe, to deliver it to the council?

‘Tis the indiligent reader who loses my subject, and not I; there will always be found some word or other in a corner that is to the purpose, though it lie very close.

I ramble indiscreetly and tumultuously; my style and my wit wander at the same rate.

He must fool it a little who would not be deemed wholly a fool, say both the precepts, and, still more, the examples of our masters. A thousand poets flag and languish after a prosaic manner;

The care of the dead is recommended to us; now, I have been bred up from my infancy with these dead; I had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long before I had any of those of my own house;

I knew the Capitol and its plan before I knew the Louvre, and the Tiber before I knew the Seine.

The qualities and fortunes of Lucullus, Metellus, and Scipio have ever run more in my head than those of any of my own country; they are all dead;

I am very much obliged to Fortune, in that, to this very hour, she has offered me no outrage beyond what I was well able to bear.

Is it not her custom to let those live in quiet by whom she is not importuned?

If she continue her favour, she will dismiss me very well satisfied:

But beware a shock: there are a thousand who perish in the port.

I easily comfort myself for what shall here happen when I shall be gone, present things trouble me enough:

and Plato sets down a middle path of life betwixt the two. But against such affections as wholly carry me away from myself and fix me elsewhere, against those, I say, I oppose myself with my utmost power.

‘Tis my opinion that a man should lend himself to others, and only give himself to himself.

Were my will easy to lend itself out and to be swayed, I should not stick there; I am too tender both by nature and use:

Men let themselves out to hire; their faculties are not for themselves, but for those to whom they have enslaved themselves; ‘tis their tenants occupy them, not themselves. This common humour pleases not me.

We must be thrifty of the liberty of our souls, and never let it out but upon just occasions, which are very few, if we judge aright.

Do but observe such as have accustomed themselves to be at every one’s call: they do it indifferently upon all, as well little as great, occasions; in that which nothing concerns them; as much as in what imports them most.

I look to myself, and commonly covet with no great ardour what I do desire, and desire little; and I employ and busy myself at the same rate, rarely and temperately. Whatever they take in hand, they do it with their utmost will and vehemence.

There are so many dangerous steps, that, for the more safety, we must a little lightly and superficially glide over the world, and not rush through it.

Pleasure itself is painful in profundity:

those of which we can see the end are hers; those that fly before us, and of which we can see no end, are our own: the poverty of goods is easily cured; the poverty of the soul is irreparable:

Socrates, seeing a great quantity of riches, jewels, and furniture carried in pomp through his city: “How many things,” said he, “I do not desire!”

—[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., V. 32.]—Metrodorus lived on twelve ounces a day, Epicurus upon less; Metrocles slept in winter abroad amongst sheep, in summer in the cloisters of churches:

let us call every one of our habits and conditions nature; let us rate and treat ourselves by this measure; let us stretch our appurtenances and accounts so far; for so far, I fancy, we have some excuse.

Custom is a second nature, and no less powerful.

What is wanting to my custom, I reckon is wanting to me; and I should be almost as well content that they took away my life as cut me short in the way wherein I have so long lived.

so should I complain of any inward acquisition.

It were almost better never, than so late, to become an honest man, and well fit to live, when one has no longer to live.

I, who am about to make my exit out of the world, would easily resign to any newcomer, who should desire it, all the prudence I am now acquiring in the world’s commerce; after meat, mustard.

wherein they do not so much regard how well the man will discharge his trust, as how short his administration will be: from the very entry they look at the exit. In short, I am about finishing this man, and not rebuilding another.

By long use, this form is in me turned into substance, and fortune into nature.

I say, therefore, that every one of us feeble creatures is excusable in thinking that to be his own which is comprised under this measure; but withal, beyond these limits, ‘tis nothing but confusion; ‘tis the largest extent we can grant to our own claims.

They swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking, according to the height of their magisterial place.

The Mayor of Bordeaux and Montaigne have ever been two by very manifest separation.

Because one is an advocate or a financier, he must not ignore the knavery there is in such callings;

And I did not grant to the magistrate himself that he did well in condemning a book because it had placed a heretic —[Theodore de Beza.]—amongst the best poets of the time.

Shall we not dare to say of a thief that he has a handsome leg?

If a woman be a strumpet, must it needs follow that she has a foul smell?

I would have the advantage on our side; but if it be not, I shall not run mad.

I am heartily for the right party; but I do not want to be taken notice of as an especial enemy to others, and beyond the general quarrel.

I marvellously challenge this vicious form of opinion: “He is of the League because he admires the graciousness of Monsieur de Guise; he is astonished at the King of Navarre’s energy, therefore he is a Huguenot;

the other seeing him in this position, “Art thou now very cold?” said he. “Not at all,” replied Diogenes. “Why, then,” pursued the other, “what difficult and exemplary thing dost thou think thou doest in embracing that snow?”

To take a true measure of constancy, one must necessarily know what the suffering is.

But souls that are to meet with adverse events and the injuries of fortune, in their depth and sharpness, that are to weigh and taste them according to their natural weight and bitterness, let such show their skill in avoiding the causes and diverting the …

… time seen the wisest heads in this kingdom assembled with great ceremony, and at the public expense, about treaties and agreements, of which the true decision, in the meantime, absolutely depended upon the ladies’ cabinet council, and the inclination of some bit of a woman.

The poets very well understood this when they put all Greece and Asia to fire and sword about an apple.

Look why that man hazards his life and honour upon the fortune of his rapier and dagger; let him acquaint you with the occasion of the quarrel; he cannot do it without blushing: the occasion is so idle and frivolous.

‘twere better to begin gently and coldly, and to keep one’s breath and vigorous efforts for the height and stress of the business.

We guide affairs in their beginnings, and have them in our own power; but afterwards, when they are once at work, ‘tis they that guide and govern us, and we are to follow them.

Yet do I not mean to say that this counsel has discharged me of all difficulty, and that I have not often had enough to do to curb and restrain my passions;

‘tis at the expense of our frankness and of the honour of our courage, that we disown our thoughts, and seek refuge in falsities, to make matters up.

We give ourselves the lie, to excuse the lie we have given to another.

You are not to consider if your word or action may admit of another interpretation; ‘tis your own true and sincere interpretation, your real meaning in what you said or did, that you are thenceforward to maintain, whatever it cost you.

Men speak to your virtue and conscience, which are not things to be put under a mask; let us leave these pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of the law.

The excuses and reparations that I see every day made and given to repair indiscretion, seem to me more scandalous than the indiscretion itself.

It were better to affront your adversary a second time than to offend yourself by giving him so unmanly a satisfaction. You have braved him in your heat and anger, and you would flatter and appease him in your cooler and better sense;

so were some surgeons of Greece wont to perform their operations upon scaffolds in the sight of the people, to draw more practice and profit. They think that good rules cannot be understood but by the sound of trumpet.

Ambition is not a vice of little people, nor of such modest means as ours.

One said to Alexander: “Your father will leave you a great dominion, easy and pacific”; this youth was emulous of his father’s victories and of the justice of his government; he would not have enjoyed the empire of the world in ease and peace.

To be puffed up with every action that is innocent or of use, is only for those with whom such things are extraordinary and rare: they will value it as it costs them.

The more a good effect makes a noise, the more do I abate of its goodness as I suspect that it was more performed for the noise, than upon account of the goodness: exposed upon the stall, ‘tis half sold.

Those actions have much more grace and lustre, that slip from the hand of him that does them, negligently and without noise, and that some honest man thereafter finds out and raises from the shade, to produce it to the light upon its own account,

I had but to conserve and to continue, which are silent and insensible effects: innovation is of great lustre; but ‘tis interdicted in this age, when we are pressed upon and have nothing to defend ourselves from but novelties.

To forbear doing is often as generous as to do; but ‘tis less in the light, and the little good I have in me is of this kind.

In fine, occasions in this employment of mine have been confederate with my humour, and I heartily thank them for it. Is there any who desires to be sick, that he may see his physician at work?

but ‘tis less in the light, and the little good I have in me is of this kind. In fine, occasions in this employment of mine have been confederate with my humour, and I heartily thank them for it.

Is there any who desires to be sick, that he may see his physician at work?

and would not the physician deserve to be whipped who should wish the plague amongst us, that he might put his art in practice?

In this way, we know the foundations and means of things that never were; and the world scuffles about a thousand questions, of which both the Pro and the Con are false.

Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are the same, and we look upon them with the same eye.

I find that we are not only remiss in defending ourselves from deceit, but that we seek and offer ourselves to be gulled; we love to entangle ourselves in vanity, as a thing conformable to our being.

The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: “it seems to me.”

They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible.

I love these words which mollify and moderate the temerity of our propositions: “peradventure; in some sort; some; ‘tis said, I think,” and the like:

“What does this mean? I understand it not; it may be: is it true?” so that they should rather have retained the form of pupils at threescore years old than to go out doctors, as they do, at ten.

Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it.

Iris is the daughter of Thaumas;

I see very well that men get angry, and that I am forbidden to doubt upon pain of execrable injuries; a new way of persuading!

Thank God, I am not to be cuffed into belief.

Let them be angry with those who accuse their opinion of falsity; I only accuse it of difficulty and boldness, and condemn the opposite affirmation equally, if not so imperiously, with them.

which is the very same cause from which Suetonius draws a quite opposite conclusion; for he says, on the contrary, that Germanicus had made his legs bigger by the continuation of the same exercise.

Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding; it is the shoe of Theramenes, fit for all feet.

It is double and diverse, and the matters are double and diverse too. “Give me a drachm of silver,” said a Cynic philosopher to Antigonus. “That is not a present befitting a king,” replied he. “Give me then a talent,” said the other.

the second said as much of himself or more: when it came to AEsop’s turn, and that he was also asked what he could do;

“Nothing,” said he, “for these two have taken up all before me; they know everything.”

So has it happened in the school of philosophy: the pride of those who attributed the capacity of all things to the human mind created in others, out of despite and emulation, this opinion, that it is capable of nothing:

that is just as nature framed it at first, and defends itself against the conflict only after a natural and ordinary way.

Books have not so much served me for instruction as exercise.

What if knowledge, trying to arm us with new defences against natural inconveniences, has more imprinted in our fancies their weight and greatness, than her reasons and subtleties to secure us from them?

how many do I ordinarily see who slight poverty? how many who desire to die, or who die without alarm or regret?

He who is now digging in my garden, has this morning buried his father or his son.

The very names by which they call diseases sweeten and mollify the sharpness of them: the phthisic is with them no more than a cough, dysentery but a looseness, the pleurisy but a stitch; and, as they gently name them, so they patiently endure them;

All discipline evades it; it comes to compose sedition, and is itself full of it; would chastise disobedience, and itself is the example; and, employed for the defence of the laws, rebels against its own. What a condition are we in!

Our physic makes us sick!

In the beginning of these popular maladies, one may distinguish the sound from the sick; but when they come to continue, as ours have done, the whole body is then infected from head to foot;

by how abject and servile ways it must arrive at its end; but it displeases me to see good and generous natures, and that are capable of justice, every day corrupted in the management and command of this confusion.

Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation.

We had ill-formed souls enough, without spoiling those that were generous and good; so that, if we hold on, there will scarcely remain any with whom to intrust the health of this State of ours, in case fortune chance to restore it:

but the losses that befall me by the injury of others, whether by theft or violence, go almost as near my heart as they would to that of the most avaricious man.

The offence troubles me, without comparison, more than the loss.

A thousand several sorts of mischiefs fell upon me in the neck of one another; I could more cheerfully have borne them all at once.

‘tis not without compassion at what we hear, but we please ourselves in rousing our displeasure, by the rarity of these pitiable events.

Nothing tickles that does not pinch.

And good historians skip over, as stagnant water and dead sea, calm narrations, to return to seditions, to wars, to which they know that we invite them.

If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will, at the time, fully and sufficiently instruct you: she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care—

We trouble life by the care of death, and death by the care of life: the one torments, the other frights us.

It is not against death that we prepare, that is too momentary a thing; a quarter of an hour’s suffering, without consequence and without damage, does not deserve especial precepts: to say the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations of death.

that superficial ugliness, which nevertheless is always the most imperious, is of least prejudice to the state of the mind, and of little certainty in the opinion of men. The other, which is never properly called deformity, being more substantial, strikes deeper in.

Not every shoe of smooth shining leather, but every shoe well-made, shews the shape of the foot within.

As Socrates said of his, it betrayed equal ugliness in his soul, had he not corrected it by education; but in saying so, I hold he was in jest, as his custom was; never so excellent a soul formed itself.

Aristotle, ‘tis said, was reproached for having been too merciful to a wicked man:

“I was indeed,” said he, “merciful to the man, but not to his wickedness.”

Ordinary judgments exasperate themselves to punishment by the horror of the fact: but it cools mine; the horror of the first murder makes me fear a second; and the deformity of the first cruelty makes me abhor all imitation of it.’

Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experience has no fewer; the consequence we would draw from the comparison of events is unsure, by reason they are always unlike.

There is no quality so universal in this image of things as diversity and variety.

Both the Greeks and the Latins and we, for the most express example of similitude, employ that of eggs;

Dissimilitude intrudes itself of itself in our works; no art can arrive at perfect similitude: neither Perrozet nor any other can so carefully polish and blanch the backs of his cards that some gamesters will not distinguish them by seeing them only shuffled by another.

Resemblance does not so much make one as difference makes another.

Nature has obliged herself to make nothing other that was not unlike.

so is it here, for in subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doubts; they put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties, and lengthen and disperse them.

In sowing and retailing questions they make the world fructify and increase in uncertainties and disputes, as the earth is made fertile by being crumbled and dug deep.

We doubted of Ulpian, and are still now more perplexed with Bartolus and Baldus. We should efface the trace of this innumerable diversity of opinions; not adorn ourselves with it, and fill posterity with crotchets. I know not what to say to it;

Estienne de la Boetie; thus translated by Cotton:

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. Is it not the principal and most reputed knowledge of our later ages to understand the learned? Is it not the common and final end of all studies?

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.

Is it not the principal and most reputed knowledge of our later ages to understand the learned? Is it not the common and final end of all studies? Our opinions are grafted upon one another;

he in some sort satisfied both, leaving the sentence in the state it was, and out of his own purse recompensing the condemned party. But he had to do with a reparable affair; my men were irreparably hanged.

How many condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes themselves?

All which makes me remember the ancient opinions, “That ‘tis of necessity a man must do wrong by retail who will do right in gross; and injustice in little things, who would come to do justice in great:

They are often made by fools, still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but always by men, vain and irresolute authors. There is nothing so much, nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws.

Whoever obeys them because they are just, does not justly obey them as he ought.

Our French laws, by their irregularity and deformity, lend, in some sort, a helping hand to the disorder and corruption that all manifest in their dispensation and execution:

The most simply to commit one’s self to nature is to do it most wisely.

Oh, what a soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, whereon to repose a well-ordered head!

I had rather understand myself well in myself, than in Cicero. Of the experience I have of myself, I find enough to make me wise, if I were but a good scholar:

The most simply to commit one’s self to nature is to do it most wisely. Oh, what a soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, whereon to repose a well-ordered head!

I had rather understand myself well in myself, than in Cicero.

Of the experience I have of myself, I find enough to make me wise, if I were but a good scholar:

Aristarchus said that anciently there were scarce seven sages to be found in the world, and in his time scarce so many fools: have not we more reason than he to say so in this age of ours?

Affirmation and obstinacy are express signs of want of wit.

This fellow may have knocked his nose against the ground a hundred times in a day, yet he will be at his Ergo’s as resolute and sturdy as before.

but by observing them by leisure, at all opportunities, and simply and naturally judging them as an eye-witness, distinctly one by one; giving him to understand upon what terms he was in the common opinion, in opposition to his flatterers.

There is none of us who would not be worse than kings, if so continually corrupted as they are with that sort of canaille.

How, if Alexander, that great king and philosopher, cannot defend himself from them!

and what I have seen, as what they have written.

And, as ‘tis held of virtue, that it is not greater for having continued longer, so do I hold of truth, that for being older it is none the wiser.

I often say, that it is mere folly that makes us run after foreign and scholastic examples; their fertility is the same now that it was in the time of Homer and Plato.

it were better to endure a cough, than, by disuse, for ever to lose the commerce of common life in things of so great utility.

Malignant science, to interdict us the most pleasant hours of the day!

Let us keep our possession to the last; for the most part, a man hardens himself by being obstinate, and corrects his constitution, as Caesar did the falling sickness, by dint of contempt.

Both well and sick, I have ever willingly suffered myself to obey the appetites that pressed upon me. I give great rein to my desires and propensities; I do not love to cure one disease by another;

I hate remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself.

To be subject to the colic and subject to abstain from eating oysters are two evils instead of one; the disease torments us on the one side, and the remedy on the other.

the disease torments us on the one side, and the remedy on the other. Since we are ever in danger of mistaking, let us rather run the hazard of a mistake, after we have had the pleasure.

The world proceeds quite the other way, and thinks nothing profitable that is not painful; it has great suspicion of facility.

My appetite, in various things, has of its own accord happily enough accommodated itself to the health of my stomach. Relish and pungency in sauces were pleasant to me when young; my stomach disliking them since, my taste incontinently followed.

all the rules of physic would hardly be able to divert me from it. I do the same when I am well; I can see very little more to be hoped or wished for.

‘Twere pity a man should be so weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him.

The art of physic is not so fixed, that we need be without authority for whatever we do;

the latter ought to prepare himself to receive it, according to its bias; as with tennis-players, he who receives the ball, shifts and prepares, according as he sees him move who strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke itself.

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

Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their recovery.

she better understands her own affairs than we. But such an one died of it; and so shall you: if not of that disease, of another. And how many have not escaped dying, who have had three physicians at their tails?

Example is a vague and universal mirror, and of various reflections.

If it be a delicious medicine, take it: ‘tis always so much present good. I will never stick at the name nor the colour, if it be pleasant and grateful to the palate: pleasure is one of the chiefest kinds of profit.

we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in despite of all medicine. ‘Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their children; so soon as ever they are born they thus salute them:

“Thou art come into the world, child, to endure: endure, suffer, and say nothing.”

‘Tis injustice to lament that which has befallen any one which may befall every one:

‘Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their children; so soon as ever they are born they thus salute them: “Thou art come into the world, child, to endure: endure, suffer, and say nothing.”

‘Tis injustice to lament that which has befallen any one which may befall every one:

See an old man who begs of God that he will maintain his health vigorous and entire; that is to say, that he restore him to youth:

We ought to grant free passage to diseases; I find they stay less with me, who let them alone; and I have lost some, reputed the most tenacious and obstinate, by their own decay, without help and without art, and contrary to its rules.

Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.

But such an one died of it; and so shall you: if not of that disease, of another. And how many have not escaped dying, who have had three physicians at their tails? Example is a vague and universal mirror, and of various reflections.

and does not think this care suitable to the Divine justice and prudence, which is to direct all things to utility.

My good friend, your business is done; nobody can restore you; they can, at the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little, and by that means prolong your misery an hour or two:

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things—of diverse tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, sprightly and solemn:

is it not folly? his condition is not capable of it.

The gout, the stone, and indigestion are symptoms of long years; as heat, rains, and winds are of long journeys.

Plato does not believe that AEsculapius troubled himself to provide by regimen to prolong life in a weak and wasted body, useless to his country and to his profession, or to beget healthful and robust children;

for ‘tis a physical cheat to expect any that they say do not go direct to death: what matters if they go thither by accident, or if they easily slide and slip into the path that leads us to it?

But thou dost not die because thou art sick; thou diest because thou art living: death kills thee without the help of sickness

: and sickness has deferred death in some, who have lived longer by reason that they thought themselves always dying; to which may be added, that as in wounds, so in diseases, some are medicinal and wholesome.

and that being so often conducted to the water-side, but still thinking thyself to be upon the accustomed terms, thou and thy confidence will at one time or another be unexpectedly wafted over.

A man cannot reasonably complain of diseases that fairly divide the time with health.

”

I am obliged to Fortune for having so often assaulted me with the same sort of weapons: she forms and fashions me by use, hardens and habituates me, so that I can know within a little for how much I shall be quit.

For want of natural memory, I make one of paper; and as any new symptom happens in my disease, I set it down

, whence it falls out that, having now almost passed through all sorts of examples, if anything striking threatens me, turning over these little loose notes, as the Sybilline leaves, I never fail of finding matter of consolation from some favourable prognostic in my past …