2000: I feel grateful to the Milesian wench who, seeing the philosopher Thales continually spending his time in contemplation of the heavenly vault and always keeping his eyes raised upward, put something in his way to make him stumble, to warn him that it would be time to amuse his thoughts with things in the clouds when he had seen to those at his feet. Indeed she gave him good counsel, to look rather to himself than to the sky.

–Michel de Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (transl. Donald M. Frame, Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, 1986), p. 402.