Michel de Montaigne

“ This other lesson is too high and too difficult: 'tis for men of the
first form of knowledge purely to insist upon the thing, to consider and
judge it; it appertains to one sole Socrates to meet death with an
ordinary countenance, to grow acquainted with it, and to sport with it;
he seeks no consolation out of the thing itself; dying appears to him a
natural and indifferent accident; 'tis there that he fixes his sight and
resolution, without looking elsewhere. ”

“ And to Niger, who exhorted him to keep his head firm: "Do
but thou strike as firmly," said he. And he very well foresaw what would
follow when he said so; for Niger's arm so trembled that he had several
blows at his head before he could cut it off. This man seems to have had
his thoughts rightly fixed upon the subject.
He who dies in a battle, with his sword in his hand, does not then think
of death; he feels or considers it not; the ardour of the fight diverts
his thought another way. ”

“ After the same manner does nature proceed, by the benefit of inconstancy;
for time, which she has given us for the sovereign physician of our
passions, chiefly works by this, that supplying our imaginations with
other and new affairs, it loosens and dissolves the first apprehension,
how strong soever. A wise man little less sees his friend dying at the
end of five-and-twenty years than on the first year ”

“ What astonished, fleeting, confused grimaces does this raving
put our faces into! what sallies and agitations both of members and
voices does it inspire us with! Does it not seem that this individual
man has false visions amid the crowd of others with whom he has to do,
or that he is possessed with some internal demon that persecutes him? ”

“ Inquire of yourself where is the object of this mutation? is there
anything but us in nature which inanity sustains, over which it has
power? Cambyses, from having dreamt that his brother should be one day
king of Persia, put him to death: a beloved brother, and one in whom he
had always confided. Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, killed himself
out of a fancy of ill omen, from I know not what howling of his dogs;
and King Midas did as much upon the account of some foolish dream he had
dreamed. 'Tis to prize life at its just value, to abandon it for a
dream. ”

“ A man goes the wrong way to work when he opposes this passion; for
opposition does but irritate and make them more obstinate in sorrow; the
evil is exasperated by discussion. We see, in common discourse, that
what I have indifferently let fall from me, if any one takes it up to
controvert it, I justify it with the best arguments I have; and much more
a thing wherein I had a real interest. And besides, in so doing you
enter roughly upon your operation; whereas the first addresses of a
physician to his patient should be gracious, gay, and pleasing ”