Michel de Montaigne

“ If I were to concern myself beyond the present about this
affair, I should be most tempted, as the greatest satisfaction of this
kind, to imitate those who in their lifetime entertain themselves with
the ceremony and honours of their own obsequies beforehand, and are
pleased with beholding their own dead countenance in marble. Happy are
they who can gratify their senses by insensibility, and live by their
death! ”

“ I myself, who have so impudent a way of talking, am, nevertheless,
naturally so modest this way, that unless at the importunity of necessity
or pleasure, I scarcely ever communicate to the sight of any either those
parts or actions that custom orders us to conceal, wherein I suffer more
constraint than I conceive is very well becoming a man, especially of my
profession. But he nourished this modest humour to such a degree of
superstition as to give express orders in his last will that they should
put him on drawers so soon as he should be dead ”

“ Whilst we have life and motion,
we convey ourselves by fancy and preoccupation, whither and to what we
please; but once out of being, we have no more any manner of
communication with that which is, and it had therefore been better said
by Solon that man is never happy, because never so, till he is no more. ”