Michel de Montaigne Quotes

588 Sourced Quotes

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.

Michel de Montaigne
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.

Michel de Montaigne
We find ourselves more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile simplicities of our children, than we do, afterward, with their most complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men.

Michel de Montaigne
I look upon the too good opinion that man has of himself, as the nursing mother of all false opinions, both public and private.

Michel de Montaigne
Fie on the eloquence that leaves us craving itself, not things!

Michel de Montaigne
Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work.

Michel de Montaigne
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.

Michel de Montaigne
Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?

Michel de Montaigne
We ought to love temperance for itself, and in obedience to God who has commanded it and chastity; but what I am forced to by catarrhs, or owe to the stone, is neither chastity nor temperance.

Michel de Montaigne
I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.

Michel de Montaigne
It costs an unreasonable woman no more to pass over one reason than another; they cherish themselves most where they are most wrong.

Michel de Montaigne
Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art.

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

Michel de Montaigne
The most useful and honorable science and occupation for a woman is the science of housekeeping. I know some that are miserly, very few that are good managers.

Michel de Montaigne
There is nothing of evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.

Michel de Montaigne
Whoever believes anything esteems that it is a work of charity to persuade another of it.

Michel de Montaigne
Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities,... hit on a body and face so ugly and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty.

Michel de Montaigne
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?

Michel de Montaigne
There is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself

Michel de Montaigne
I, who am king of the matter I treat, and who owe an accounting for it to no one, do not for all that believe myself in all I write. I often hazard sallies of my mind which I mistrust.

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

Michel de Montaigne
The good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason. Whoever discerns its beauty with a firm, sedate gaze does not see it, any more than he sees the splendor of a lightning flash. It does not persuade our judgement, it ravishes and overwhelms it.

Michel de Montaigne
There is nothing on which men are commonly more intent than on making a way for their opinions.

Michel de Montaigne
I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.

Michel de Montaigne
We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty; but an advantage in judgment we yield to none.

Michel de Montaigne
Oh, what a valiant faculty is hope, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying its masters indigence, at its pleasure, with all things he can imagine or desire!

Michel de Montaigne
This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

Michel de Montaigne
It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children.

Michel de Montaigne
The relish of good and evil depends in a great measure upon the opinion we have of them.

Michel de Montaigne
To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and taciturn demeanor procured the credit of prudence and capacity!

Michel de Montaigne