Michel de Montaigne

Why do we leave for lands warmed by a foreign sun? What fugitive from his own land can flee from himself ?

in lonely places, be a crowd unto yourself

Does knowing mean nothing to you, unless somebody else knows that you know it?

Whether we are running our home or studying or hunting or following any other sport, we should go to the very boundaries of pleasure but take good care not to be involved beyond the point where it begins to be mingled with pain. We should retain just enough occupations and pursuits to keep ourselves fit and to protect ourselves from the unpleasantness which comes in the train of that other extreme: slack and inert idleness.

For pleasures to be tasted and then digested they must remain moderate

Many peoples less barbarous in this respect than the Greeks and the Romans who call them the Barbarians reckon it horrifying and cruel to torture and smash a man of whose crime you are still in doubt. That ignorant doubt is yours: what has it to do with him? You are the unjust one, are you not?

No passion disturbs the soundness of our judgement as anger does. No one would hesitate to punish with death a judge who was led to condemn his man as a criminal out of anger: then why is it any more permissible for fathers and schoolmasters to punish and flog children in anger?

One of Plutarch’s slaves, a bad, wicked man whose ears had however drunk in a few lectures in philosophy, had been stripped for some crime by order of Plutarch; at first, while he was being flogged, he snarled about its not being right and that he had not done anything wrong; but in the end he started to shout abuse at his master in good earnest, accusing him of not really being a philosopher as he boasted, since he had often heard him say that it was ugly to get angry and had even written a book on the subject; the fact that he was now immersed in anger and having him cruelly flogged completely gave the lie to his writings. To which Plutarch, quite without heat and completely calm, replied: ‘What makes you think, you ruffian, that I am angry at this time? Does my face, my voice, my colouring or my speech bear any witness to my being excited? I do not think my eyes are wild, my face distorted nor my voice terrifying. Is my face inflamed? Am I foaming at the mouth? Do words escape me which I will later regret? Am I all a-tremble? Am I shaking with wrath? Those, I can tell you, are the true symptoms of anger.’ Then turning towards the man who was doing the flogging he said, ‘Carry on with your job, while this man and I are having a discussion.’

Phocion, when a man kept interrupting what he was saying with bitter insults, simply stopped talking, giving him enough time to exhaust his choler; when that was over, without mentioning the disturbance, he took up his speech just where he had left off. No retort goads a man more sharply than disdain such as that.

Aristotle says that choler sometimes serves virtue and valour as a weapon.14 That is most likely; nevertheless those who deny it have an amusing reply: it must be some new-fangled weapon; for we wield the other weapons: that one wields us; it is not our hand that guides it: it guides our hand; it gets a hold on us: not we on it.