From now on, Montaigne would live for himself rather than for duty. - Sarah Bakewell

Learning should be a pleasure, and children should grow up to imagine wisdom with a smiling face, not a fierce and terrifying one.

Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, “I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it. … The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”

The peasantry … were the true philosophers of the modern world, the heirs to classical sages such as Seneca and Socrates. Only they knew how to live, precisely because they knew nothing much about anything else.