Advise to choose weapons of the shortest sort
     An ignorance that knowledge creates and begets
     Ashamed to lay out as much thought and study upon it
     Can neither keep nor enjoy anything with a good grace
     Change of fashions
     Chess:  this idle and childish game
     Death is terrible to Cicero, coveted by Cato
     Death of old age the most rare and very seldom seen
     Diogenes, esteeming us no better than flies or bladders
     Do not to pray that all things may go as we would have them
     Excel above the common rate in frivolous things
     Expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other
     Fancy that others cannot believe otherwise than as he does
     Gradations above and below pleasure
     Greatest apprehensions, from things unseen, concealed
     He did not think mankind worthy of a wise man’s concern
     Home anxieties and a mind enslaved by wearing complaints
     How infirm and decaying material this fabric of ours is
     I do not willingly alight when I am once on horseback
     Led by the ears by this charming harmony of words
     Little knacks and frivolous subtleties
     Men approve of things for their being rare and new
     Must of necessity walk in the steps of another
     Natural death the most rare and very seldom seen
     Not to instruct but to be instructed. 
     Present Him such words as the memory suggests to the tongue
     Psalms of King David:  promiscuous, indiscreet
     Rhetoric:  an art to flatter and deceive
     Rhetoric:  to govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble
     Sitting betwixt two stools
     Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind
     Stupidity and facility natural to the common people
     The Bible:  the wicked and ignorant grow worse by it. 
     The faintness that surprises in the exercises of Venus
     Thucydides:  which was the better wrestler
     To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular
     To make little things appear great was his profession
     To smell, though well, is to stink
     Valour will cause a trembling in the limbs as well as fear
     Viscid melting kisses of youthful ardour in my wanton age
     We can never be despised according to our full desert
     When we have got it, we want something else
     Women who paint, pounce, and plaster up their ruins

ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazilitt

1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 9.

I. Of the inconstancy of our actions. 
II.  Of drunkenness. 
III.  A custom of the Isle of Cea. 
IV.  To-morrow’s a new day. 
V. Of conscience. 
Vi.  Use makes perfect.