Michel De Montaigne quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Michel De Montaigne

Michel De Montaigne Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Michel De Montaigne on Wise Famous Quotes.

Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.

No spirited mind remains within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its power of achievement.

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

Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.

In my youth I studied for ostentation; later, a little to gain wisdom; now, for recreation; never for gain.

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.

A foreign war is a lot milder than a civil war.

Those things that are dearest to us have cost us the most.

Every man carries the entire form of human condition.

All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.

It is indeed the boundary of life, beyond which we are not to pass; which the law of nature has pitched for a limit not to be exceeded.

And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?

Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

And if nobody reads me, shall I have wasted my time, when I have beguiled so many idle hours with such pleasant and profitable reflections?

Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on credit.

We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him.

Once you have decided to keep a certain pile, it is no longer yours; for you can't spend it.

Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.

A good marriage (if any there be) refuses the conditions of love and endeavors to present those of amity.

If it lay in my power to make myself feared, I had rather make myself beloved.

Books are a languid pleasure.

Might I have had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would have had me.

The first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die ... and to live.

Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

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

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

Man is quite insane. He wouldn?t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.

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

There is nothing which so poisons princes as flattery, nor anything whereby wicked men more easily obtain credit and favor with them.

True freedom is to have power over oneself for everything.

Don't be afraid to say what you are not afraid to think

I would rather let affairs break their neck than twist my faith for the sake of them.

Our religion is made to eradicate vices, instead it encourages them, covers them, and nurtures them.

No wind favors he who has no destined port.

[Folly never thinks it has enough, even when it obtains what it desires, but Wisdom is happy with what is to hand and is never vexed with itself.]3

As for dying we can only assay that once; we are all apprentices when it comes to that

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.

My trade and art is to live.

It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.

I must accommodate my history to the hour: I may presently change, not only by fortune, but also by intention.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

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

I care not so much what I am in the opinion of others, as what I am in my own.

The profit we possess after study is to have become better and wiser.

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

Kings and philosophers shit - and so do ladies.

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

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

Only he can judge of matters great and high whose soul is likewise.

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.

I say that male and female are cast in the same mold; except for education and habits, the difference is not great.

An outstanding memory is often associated with weak judgement.

Lucius Arruntius killed himself, he said, to escape both the future and the past.

Only the fools are certain and assured.

Not only does the wind of accidents stir me according to its blowing, but I am also stirred and troubled by the instability of my attitude.

There are no truths, only moments of claryty passing for answers.

There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline.

Words repeated again have as another sound, so another sense.

To philosophize is to learn to die.

Honesty is a question of right and wrong, not a matter of policy

Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing.

The good opinion of the vulgar is injurious.

How many quarrels, and how important, has the doubt as to the meaning of this syllable "Hoc" produced for the world!

The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.

Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.

I moreover affirm that our wisdom itself, and wisest consultations, for the most part commit themselves to the conduct of chance.

I love a gay and sociable wisdom, and shun harshness and austerity in behaviour, holding every surly countenance suspect.

Death is not one of our social managements; it is a scene with one character.

Glory consists of two parts: the one in setting too great a value upon ourselves, and the other in setting too little a value upon others.

A well-bred man is always sociable and complaisant.

Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have done. I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future.

As far as I am concerned, no road that would lead us to health is either arduous or expensive.

One should be ever booted and spurred and ready to depart.

Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.

It is not a mind, it is not a body that we educate, but it is a man, and we must not make two parts of him.

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

The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.

I admire the assurance and confidence everyone has in himself, whereas there is hardly anything I am sure I know or that I dare give my word I can do.

To philosophize is to doubt.

There never were, in the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity.

Not because Socrates said so, ... I look upon all men as my compatriots.

A man must learn to endure patiently what he cannot avoid conveniently.

There is hardly less torment in running a family than in running a country.

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

To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.

Is only certain that there is nothing certain, and that nothing is more miserable or more proud than man.Nat. Hist., ii. 7.]

Oddness or novelty (qualities which usually give value to anything)

A hair shirt does not always render those chaste who wear it.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.

My appetite comes to me while eating.

All permanent decisions are made in a temporary state of mind.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

He who falls obstinate in his courage, if he falls he fights from his knees.

The Stoics forbid this emotion to their sages as being base and cowardly.