Michele de Montaigne says:

Reading consoles me in my treat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can read me of boring company. It blunts the slabs of pain whenever pain is not too overpowering and extreme. To distract me from morose tought, I simply need to have recourse the books.

To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is, nothing, we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads.

I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virture and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivatives and their etymologiy.

... But what matters most is what we put last: 'Has he become better and wiser?' We ought to find out not who understands most but who understand best. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understand and the sense of right and wrong empty.

The moment when [two people] begin to love each oterh - to fancy each other, as the very apposite English expression has it - is actually to be regarded as the very first formation of a new individual.

We shoud in time learn to forgive our rejectors.

We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them,what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. Sop too must we with good and will, which are of one subtance with our life.