The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues.

Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

[T]omorrow is a new day. You shall begin it well & serenely, & with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day ... is too dear with its hopes & invitations to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.

The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.

Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book.