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.