🚀 go-pugleaf

on suicide, on
death. He suggests an indifference about salvation, without fear and without
repentance. As his book was not written with a religious purpose, he was not
bound to mention religion; but it is always our duty not to turn men from
it. One can excuse his rather free and licentious opinions on some relations
of life; but one cannot excuse his thoroughly pagan views on death, for a
man must renounce piety altogether, if he does not at least wish to die like
a Christian. Now, through the whole of his book his only conception of death
is a cowardly and effeminate one.

64. It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in
him.

65. What good there is in Montaigne can only have been acquired with
difficulty. The evil that is in him, I mean apart from his morality, could
have been corrected in a moment, if he had been informed that he made too
much of trifles and spoke too much of himself.

66. One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at
least serves as a rule of life, and there is nothing better.

67. The vanity of the sciences.--Physical science will not console me for
the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of
ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences.

68. Men are never taught to be gentlemen and are taught everything else; and
they never plume themselves so much on the rest of their knowledge as on
knowing how to be gentlemen. They only plume themselves on knowing the one
thing they do not know.

69. The infinites, the mean.--When we read too fast or too slowly, we
understand nothing.

70. Nature... --Nature has set us so well in the centre, that if we change
one side of the balance, we change the other also. This makes me believe
that the springs in our brain are so adjusted that he who touches one
touches also its contrary.

71. Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give
him too much, the sa