More from Michel de Montaigne
He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.
Essais, Book I, “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die” (tr. Cotton, rev. W. Hazlitt, 1842)- Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Book iii. Chap 2. Of Repentance
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
More about reading
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain1835–1910Quoting or paraphrasing a Professor Winchester in “Disappearance of Literature”, speech at the Nineteenth Century Club, New York, 20 November 1900, in Mark Twain’s Speeches (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, p. 194The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
