64

It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.

65

What good there is in Montaigne can only have been acquired with difficulty.  The evil that is in him, I mean apart from his morality, could have been corrected in a moment, if he had been informed that he made too much of trifles and spoke too much of himself.

66

One must know oneself.  If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life, and there is nothing better.

67

The vanity of the sciences.—­Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction.  But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences.

68

Men are never taught to be gentlemen, and are taught everything else; and they never plume themselves so much on the rest of their knowledge as on knowing how to be gentlemen.  They only plume themselves on knowing the one thing they do not know.

69

The infinites, the mean.—­When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

70

Nature ...—­[Nature has set us so well in the centre, that if we change one side of the balance, we change the other also. I act. +Ta zoa trechei.+ This makes me believe that the springs in our brain are so adjusted that he who touches one touches also its contrary.]

71

Too much and too little wine.  Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.

72

Man’s disproportion.—­[This is where our innate knowledge leads us.  If it be not true, there is no truth in man; and if it be true, he finds therein great cause for humiliation, being compelled to abase himself in one way or another.  And since he cannot exist without this knowledge, I wish that, before entering on deeper researches into nature, he would consider her both seriously and at leisure, that he would reflect upon himself also, and knowing what proportion there is....] Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty, and turn his vision from the low objects which surround him.  Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament.  But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception.  The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature.  No idea approaches it.  We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things.  It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.[30] In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought.