Michel de Montaigne

Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.

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

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.

It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength.

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.

It is an absolute and virtually divine perfection to know how to enjoy our being rightfully.

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

The thing I fear most is fear.

Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think.