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21 " To understand the essence and workings of insanity, Gallus Vibius strained his mind so that he tore his judgment from its seat and could never get it back again: he could boast he became mad through wisdom.1 "
― Michel de Montaigne , The Essays: A Selection
22 " I keep telling myself: anything that can be done some other day can be done today.xiii "
23 " Anyone who teaches men how to die would teach them how to live.36 "
24 " let us learn to withstand it resolutely, and to fight it. And to start to rid it of its greatest advantage over us, let us take a completely different route from the usual one. Let us rid it of its strangeness, get to know it, become accustomed to it. Let us have nothing so often in our minds as death. Let us picture it in our imagination constantly, in all its aspects. "
25 " Let us never allow ourselves to be carried away so completely by pleasure that we fail to recall from time to time in how many ways our happiness is prey to death and threatened by its grip. "
26 " Every one of us is a hodge-podge, so shapeless and diverse in structure that each piece, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others. I "
27 " It is not certain where Death awaits us, so let us await it everywhere. To think of death beforehand is to think of our liberty. Whoever learns how to die has learned how not to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.xi "
28 " If you did not have death, you would curse me incessantly for depriving you of it. Realizing its advantages, I have deliberately mixed a little bitterness into it to prevent you from embracing it too greedily and imprudently. To place you in the state of moderation I ask of you, of neither running from life nor fleeing from death, I have modulated them both between sweet and bitter. "