A Montaigne Sampler

I was interested to hear from our discussants at our February 15th meeting if they thought Montaigne's "Of Experience" hung together as a philosophical work, or if it was more a collection of random musings by the great essayist. I'm not sure we resolved this question, but most people seemed to enjoy Montaigne's bon mots, and so here I offer a few of them (from the Donald M. Frame translation):
There is no end to our researches; our end is in the other world. It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its powers of achievement. If it does not advance and press forward and stand at bay and clash, it is only half alive. Its pursuits are boundless and without form; its food is wonder, the chase ambiguity.

I often say that it is pure stupidity that makes us run after foreign and scholarly examples. There is as great an abundance of them in this age as in that of Homer and Plato. But is it not true that we seek rather the honor of quoting than the truth of the statement?*

On raising children: Let them be formed by fortune under the custom of the common people and of nature; leave it to custom to train them to frugality and austerity, so that they may have rather to come down from rigorousness than climb toward it.

I am more naturally inclined to follow the example of Flaminius, who lent himself to those who needed him more than to those who could benefit him, than that of Pyrrhus, who was prone to truckle to the great and be arrogant with the weak.

[W]e should not so much consider what we eat as with whom we eat. (quoting Epicurus)

Greatness of soul is not so much pressing upward and forward as knowing how to set oneself in order and circumscribe oneself.

There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play to man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

*Present company excepted, bien sûr.