Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them? — Alain de Botton

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.