Anything we do reveals us. The same soul of Caesar’s which displayed herself in ordering and arranging the battle of Pharsalia is also displayed when arranging his idle and amorous affrays. You judge a horse not only by seeing its paces on a race-track but by seeing it walk—indeed, by seeing it in its stable.
—Montaigne, Essays I:50
We do not command our hair to stand on end with fear nor our flesh to quiver with desire. Our hands often go where we do not tell them; our tongues can fail, our voices congeal, when they want to.
—Montaigne, Essays I:21
I am not made for novels or plays. Their grand scenes, rages, passions, tragic moments, far from exciting me, strike me as cheap outbursts, rudimentary states in which all kinds of stupidity are let loose, where the human being is simplified to the point of foolishness and drowns instead of swimming in the waters of circumstance.
—Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste
Montaigne quotations from The Complete Essays (Penguin, 1993); Paul Valéry quotation from Monsieur Teste (New York Review Books, 2025).
And they put forth an ill report to the Israelites of the land that they had scouted, saying, “The land through which we passed to scout is a land that consumes those who dwell in it, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of huge measure. And there did we see the Nephilim, sons of the giant from the Nephilim, and we were in our own eyes like grasshoppers, and so were we in their eyes.”
—Numbers 13:32-33
Verse from R. Alter’s Hebrew Bible (Norton, 2019).
And the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore it is called Babel, for there the Lord made the language of all the earth babble. And from there the Lord scattered them over all the earth.
—Genesis 11:8-9
Verses from R. Alter’s Hebrew Bible (Norton, 2019).
Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with twelve stars on her head for a crown. She was pregnant, and in labour, crying aloud in the pangs of childbirth.
—Revelation 12:1-2
So the serpent vomited water from his mouth, like a river, after the woman, to sweep her away in the current, but the earth came to her rescue; it opened its mouth and swallowed the river thrown up by the dragon's jaws.
—Revelation 12:15-16
Verses from The Jerusalem Bible (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1968).
