I have absolutely no other passion but love to keep me going. What covetousness, ambition, quarrels and lawsuits do for men who, like me, have no other allotted task, love would do more suitably: it would restore me to vigilance, sober behaviour, graceful manners and care about my person; love would give new strength to my features so that the distortions of old age, pitiful and misshapen, should not come and disfigure them; it would bring me back to wise and healthy endeavours by which I could make myself better esteemed and better loved, banishing from my mind all sense of hopefulness about itself and about its application, while bringing it to know itself again: it would divert me away from a thousand painful thoughts, from a thousand melancholy sorrows which idleness burdens us with old age, as does the poor state of our health; it would, at least in dream, restore some heat to my blood - this blood of mine which Nature is forsaking; it would lift up my chin and unbuckle my sinews as well as the vigour and exhilaration of the soul for this poor fellow who is on his way out, rushing toward disintegration.
Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On some lines of Virgil (III, 5)
