Michel de Montaigne Quotes

It has never occurred to me to wish for empire or royalty, nor for the eminence of those high and commanding fortunes. My aim lies not in that direction; I love myself too well.

The births of all things are weak and tender and therefore we should have our eyes intent on beginnings.

When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing.

How many worthy men have we known to survive their own reputation, who have seen and suffered the honor and glory most justly acquired in their youth, extinguished in their own presence?

I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.

A good marriage ... is a sweet association in life: full of constancy, trust, and an infinite number of useful and solid services and mutual obligations.

Who is it that does not voluntarily exchange his health, his repose, and his very life for reputation and glory? The most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes current among us.

A volunteer, you assign yourself specific roles and risks according to your judgement of their brilliance and importance, and you see when life itself may be justifiably devoted to them.

We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.

Unless a man feels he has a good enough memory, he should never venture to lie.

I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere." "To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.

Experience has further taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.

There is no greater enemy to those who would please than expectation.

We seem ambitious God's whole work to undo. ...With new diseases on ourselves we war, And with new physic, a worse engine far.

Whenever a new discovery is reported to the world, they say first, It is probably not true, Then after, when the truth of the new proposition has been demonstrated beyond question, they say, Yes, it may be true, but it is not important. Finally, when sufficient time has elapsed to fully evidence its importance, they say, Yes, surely it is important, but it is no longer new.

It is a small soul, buried beneath the weight of affairs, that does not know how to get clean away from them, that cannot put them aside and pick them up again.

No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.

Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path.

It is not my deeds that I write down, it is myself, my essence.

Since we cannot match it let us take our revenge by abusing it.

We commend a horse for his strength, and sureness of foot, and not for his rich caparisons; a greyhound for his share of heels, not for his fine collar; a hawk for her wing, not for her jesses and bells. Why, in like manner, do we not value a man for what is properly his own? He has a great train, a beautiful palace, so much credit, so many thousand pounds a year, and all these are about him, but not in him.

We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

No doctor takes pleasure in the health even of his friends.

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum.

I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's.

The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.

Presumption is our natural and original malady. The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant.

It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness.

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own.

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.

Is it not a noble farce, wherein kings, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the whole vast universe serves for a theatre?

Wise people are foolish if they cannot adapt to foolish people.

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

There is a huge gulf between the man who follows the conventions and laws of his country and the man who sets out to regiment them and to change them.

The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion-the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt-both with the common motion and with their own.

It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.

If health and a fair day smile upon me, I am a very good fellow; if a corn trouble my toe, I am sullen, out of humor, and inaccessible.

This very Rome that we behold deserves our love ...: the only common and universal city.

Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it.

No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.

Every man has within himself the entire human condition

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

The wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can.