“The peasantry … were the true philosophers of the modern world, the heirs to classical sages such as Seneca and Socrates. Only they knew how to live, precisely because they knew nothing much about anything else.”
Source: How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in one Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010), p. 51.
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Sarah Bakewell 12
English author and curator 1963Related quotes

“She knew the true shape of the world. All else was shadow and the sound of distant drums.”
Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Petronius, Ch. 72
Quo Vadis (1895)
Context: No God has promised me immortality; hence no surprise meets me. At the same time thou art mistaken, Vinicius, in asserting that only thy God teaches man to die calmly. No. Our world knew, before thou wert born, that when the last cup was drained, it was time to go, — time to rest, — and it knows yet how to do that with calmness. Plato declares that virtue is music, that the life of a sage is harmony. If that be true, I shall die as I have lived, — virtuously.

About his wife Nargis’s past love life. Nargis-Sunil Dutt: A real life romance, 20 October 2003, 6 December 2013, Rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/movies/2003/oct/20dutt.htm,
We all are one, whichever religion we belong to

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 20
Context: Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word ‘quality’ cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

“He that knew all that ever Learning writ,
Knew only this - that he knew nothing yet.”
The Emperor of the Moon, Act III, sc. iii.