Michel de Montaigne Quotes

588 Sourced Quotes

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

Michel de Montaigne
We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

Michel de Montaigne
Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

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

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

Michel de Montaigne
Can anything be imagined so ridiculous that this miserable and wretched creature, who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?

Michel de Montaigne
I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.

Michel de Montaigne
The plague of man is the opinion of knowledge. That is why ignorance is so recommended by our religion as a quality suitable to belief and obedience.

Michel de Montaigne
Pride dwells in the thought; the tongue can have but a very little share in it.

Michel de Montaigne
Virtue cannot be followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.

Michel de Montaigne
If I am to serve as an instrument of deceit, at least let it be with a clear conscience. I do not want to be considered either so affectionate or so loyal a servant as to be found fit to betray anyone.

Michel de Montaigne
Who ever saw a doctor use the prescription of his colleague without cutting out or adding something?

Michel de Montaigne
To say less of yourself than is true is stupidity, not modesty. To pay yourself less than you are worth is cowardice and pusillanimity.

Michel de Montaigne
Friendship that possesses the whole soul, and there rules and sways with an absolute sovereignty, can admit of no rival.

Michel de Montaigne
Nature has with a Motherly Tenderness observed this, that the Action she has enjoyned us for our Necessity should be also pleasant to us, and invites us to them, not only by Reason, but also by Appetite: and ’tis Injustice to infringe her Laws.

Michel de Montaigne
Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of; just as we call "money" not only that which is legal, but also any counterfeit that will pass.

Michel de Montaigne
For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness.

Michel de Montaigne
He who does not live in some degree for others, hardly lives for himself.

Michel de Montaigne
What we are told of the inhabitants of Brazil, that they never die but of old age, is attributed to the tranquility and serenity of their climate; I rather attribute it to the tranquility and serenity of their souls, which are free from all passion, thought, or any absorbing and unpleasant labors. Those people spend their lives in an admirable simplicity and ignorance, without letters, without law, without king, without any manner of religion.

Michel de Montaigne
To honor him whom we have made is far from honoring him that hath made us.

Michel de Montaigne
I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion.

Michel de Montaigne
Glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place.

Michel de Montaigne
We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned.

Michel de Montaigne
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.

Michel de Montaigne
Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.

Michel de Montaigne
I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance.

Michel de Montaigne
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.

Michel de Montaigne
There are few things on which we can pass a sincere judgement, because there are few things in which we have not, in one way or another, a particular interest.

Michel de Montaigne
Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency: a man may very well say a good thing, give a good answer, cite a good sentence, without at all seeing the force of either the one or the other.

Michel de Montaigne
Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.

Michel de Montaigne