'Self-understanding for Montaigne is dialogue with self. It is a questioning addressed to the opaque being he is and awaits a response from. It is like "essaying" or "experimenting on" himself. He has in view a questioning without which reason's purity would be illusory and in the end impure. Some are amazed that he should want to speak about even the details of his mood and temperament. It is because for him every doctrine, when it is separated from what we do, threatens to be mendacious; and he imagined a book in which for once there would be expressed not only ideas but also the very life in which they appear and which modifies their meaning.'

'to darken the heavens, to blot out the sun, to cast suspicion on joy, to deprive hope of its value, to paralyse the active hand'

'… the two pacifying formulae of Epicurus, which are capable of being applied to very many questions. Reduced to their simplest form they would perhaps become: firstly, if that is how things are they do not concern us; secondly, things may be thus but they may also be otherwise.'

'… to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow…'

'The world we know is not this ultimately simple configuration where events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, or their initial and final value. On the contrary, it is a profusion of entangled events.'

'For the loomings-up and dwindlings and obliterations of perspective we might find an analogy.'

the sea / severs not only lands but also selves

'They who inquire what we personally think about each matter are more curious than is necessary.'

'… one could then estimate the enormous undertaking it is nowadays merely to be a person who does nothing at all. At the moment, the man without qualities was just such a person.'