Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.
Michel de MontaigneI have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that tied them together.
Michel de MontaigneFortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter, and the seed, which our soul, more powerfully than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.
Michel de MontaigneMen throw themselves on foreign assistances to spare their own, which, after all, are the only certain and sufficient ones.
Michel de Montaigne