Presumptive knowledge by silence
     Silent mien procured the credit of prudence and capacity
     Spectators can claim no interest in the honour and pleasure
     Study of books is a languishing and feeble motion
     The cause of truth ought to be the common cause
     The event often justifies a very foolish conduct
     The ignorant return from the combat full of joy and triumph
     The very name Liberality sounds of Liberty. 
     There are some upon whom their rich clothes weep
     There is no merchant that always gains
     There is nothing single and rare in respect of nature
     They have heard, they have seen, they have done so and so
     They have not the courage to suffer themselves to be corrected
     Tis impossible to deal fairly with a fool
     To fret and vex at folly, as I do, is folly itself
     Transferring of money from the right owners to strangers
     Tutor to the ignorance and folly of the first we meet
     Tyrannic sourness not to endure a form contrary to one’s own
     Universal judgments that I see so common, signify nothing
     “What he laughed at, being alone?”—­“That I do laugh alone,”
     We are not to judge of counsels by events
     We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him
     We neither see far forward nor far backward
     Whilst thou wast silent, thou seemedst to be some great thing
     Who has once been a very fool, will never after be very wise
     Wide of the mark in judging of their own works
     Wise may learn more of fools, than fools can of the wise

ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

Translated by Charles Cotton

Edited by William Carew Hazilitt

1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 17.

IX.  Of Vanity

CHAPTER IX

OF VANITY

There is, peradventure, no more manifest vanity than to write of it so vainly.  That which divinity has so divinely expressed to us—­["Vanity of vanities:  all is vanity.”—­Eccles., i. 2.]—­ought to be carefully and continually meditated by men of understanding.  Who does not see that I have taken a road, in which, incessantly and without labour, I shall proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in the world?  I can give no account of my life by my actions; fortune has placed them too low:  I must do it by my fancies.  And yet I have seen a gentleman who only communicated his life by the workings of his belly:  you might see on his premises a show of a row of basins of seven or eight days’ standing; it was his study, his discourse; all other talk stank in his nostrils.  Here, but not so nauseous, are the excrements of an old mind, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, and always indigested.  And when shall I have done representing the continual agitation and mutation of my thoughts, as they come into my head, seeing that Diomedes wrote six thousand books upon the sole subject of grammar?