Michel de Montaigne Quotes

How many condemnations I have witnessed more criminal than the crime!

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear.

We have so much ill fortune as inconstancy, or so much bad purpose as folly, we are not so full of evil as we are of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are base

Is it not enough to make me come back to life out of spite, to have someone who spat in my face while I existed come and rub my feet when I am beginning to exist no longer?

My library is my kingdom, and here I try to make my rule absolute-shutting off this single nook from wife, daughter and society. Elsewhere I have only a verbal authority, and vague. Unhappy is the man, in my opinion, who has no spot at home where he can be at home to himself-to court himself and hide away.

Behold the hands, how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate, refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command, mock and what not besides, with a variation and multiplication of variation which makes the tongue envious.

Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.

Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.

The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.

Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.

The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.

To behave rightly, we ourselves should never lay a hand on our servants as long as our anger lasts. Things will seem different to us when we have quieted and cooled down.

Natural inclinations are assisted and reinforced by education, but they are hardly ever altered or overcome.

Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than prudent and just.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

As soon as women become ours we are no longer theirs.

Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.

Teach him a certain refinement in sorting out and selecting his arguments, with an affection for relevance and so for brevity. Above all let him be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether the truth is born at his rival's doing or within himself from some change in his ideas.

Rash and incessant scolding runs into custom and renders itself despised.

Virtue can have naught to do with ease. . . . It craves a steep and thorny path.

Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world? I cannot keep a record of my life by my actions; fortune places them too low. I keep it by my thoughts.

I may indeed very well happen to contradict myself; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.

My trade and art is to live.

An orator of past times declared that his calling was to make small things appear to be grand.

Old age is a lease nature only signs as a particular favor, and it may be, to one, only in the space of two or three ages; and then with a pass to boot, to carry him through, all the traverses and difficulties she has strewed in the way of his long career.

In his commerce with men I mean him to include- and that principally- those who live only in the memory of books. By means of history he will frequent those great souls of former years. If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time; it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.

Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.

The easy, gentle, and sloping path . . . is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.

If people must be talking about me, I would have it to be truthfully and justly. I would willingly return from the next world to contradict any person who described me other than I was, although he did it to honour me.

Tis well for old age that it is always accompanied with want of perception, ignorance, and a facility of being deceived. For should we see how we are used and would not acquiesce, what would become of us?

As great enmities spring from great friendships, and mortal distempers from vigorous health, so do the most surprising and the wildest frenzies from the high and lively agitations of our souls.

It is a stupid presumption to go about despising and condemning as false anything that seems to us improbable; this is a common fault in those who think they have more intelligence than the crowd.

In love, 'tis no other than frantic desire for that which flies from us.

Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.

Man will rise, if God by exception lends him a hand; he will rise by abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himselfbe raised and uplifted by purely celestial means.

Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly.

Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.

How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

But sure there is need of other remedies than dreaming, a weak contention of art against nature.

No one should be subjected to force over things which belonged to him.

If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time; it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.

Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.

Women are not altogether in the wrong when they refuse the rules of life prescribed to the World, for men only have established them and without their consent.

There is nothing so noble and so right as to play our human life well and fitly, nor anything so difficult to learn as how to livethis life well and according to Nature.

We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater to possess it