Michel de Montaigne

"Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them."

"For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions."

"Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky."

"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."

"If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it."

"In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum."

"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."

"It is not death, it is dying that alarms me."

"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."

"Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out."

"Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance."

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened."

"My trade and art is to live."

"No pleasure has any savor for me without communication."

"Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity."

"The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death."

"The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage."

"There are some defeats more triumphant than victories."

"There is 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 tell it to."

"Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep."

"Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul."