Michel de Montaigne Quotes

588 Sourced Quotes

Physicians have this advantage: the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures.

Michel de Montaigne
I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it.

Michel de Montaigne
There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.

Michel de Montaigne
Confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.

Michel de Montaigne
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.

Michel de Montaigne
Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own.

Michel de Montaigne
It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.

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

Michel de Montaigne
What if he has borrowed the matter and spoiled the form, as it oft falls out?

Michel de Montaigne
Accustom him to everything, that he may not be a Sir Paris, a carpet-knight, 5 but a sinewy, hardy, and vigorous young man.

Michel de Montaigne
Every day I hear stupid people say things that are not stupid.

Michel de Montaigne
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.

Michel de Montaigne
There were never in the world two opinions alike, any more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity.

Michel de Montaigne
I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood... I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world.

Michel de Montaigne
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.

Michel de Montaigne
No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.

Michel de Montaigne
It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

Michel de Montaigne
Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot, and he creates gods by the dozen.

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

Michel de Montaigne
I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.

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

Michel de Montaigne
Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?.. But in truth I know nothing about the philosophy of education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.

Michel de Montaigne
We are Christians by the same title as we are natives of Perigord or Germany.

Michel de Montaigne
The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried.

Michel de Montaigne
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.

Michel de Montaigne
The bitterness of the potion, and the abhorrence of the patient are necessary circumstances to the operation. It must be something to trouble and disturb the stomach that must purge and cure it.

Michel de Montaigne
It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.

Michel de Montaigne
When I play with my cat, who knows whether she isn't amusing herself with me more than I am with her?

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

Michel de Montaigne
Speech belongs half to him who speaks and half to him who hears.

Michel de Montaigne