Michel de Montaigne Quotes

591 Sourced Quotes

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.

Michel de Montaigne
The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life.

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
Apollo said that every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be.

Michel de Montaigne
In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place

Michel de Montaigne
Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not.

Michel de Montaigne
Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... We are sleeping awake, and waking asleep.

Michel de Montaigne
In truth, the care and expense of our fathers aims only at furnishing our heads with knowledge; of judgement and virtue, little news.

Michel de Montaigne
Since we cannot attain to greatness, let us revenge ourselves by railing against it.

Michel de Montaigne
The wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.

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

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

Michel de Montaigne
When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?

Michel de Montaigne
L'homme d'entendement n'a rien perdu, s'il a soi-même.

Michel de Montaigne
The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

Michel de Montaigne
Necessity reconciles and brings men together; and this accidental connection afterward forms itself into laws.

Michel de Montaigne
To make the handle bigger than the hand, the cubic longer than the arm, and to hope to stride further than our legs can reach, is both impossible and monstrous; or that man should rise above himself and humanity; for he cannot see but with his eyes, nor seize but with his hold. He shall be exalted, if God will lend him an extraordinary hand; he shall exalt himself, by abandoning and renouncing his own proper means, and by suffering himself to be raised and elevated by means purely celestial. It belongs to our Christian faith, and not to the stoical virtue, to pretend to that divine and miraculous metamorphosis.

Michel de Montaigne
Great authors, when they write about causes, adduce not only those they think are true but also those they do not believe in, provided they have some originality and beauty. They speak truly and usefully enough if they speak ingeniously.

Michel de Montaigne
The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

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

Michel de Montaigne
Diversity of opinion proves that things are only what we think them.

Michel de Montaigne
The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold.... The same reason that makes us bicker with a neighbor creates a war between princes.

Michel de Montaigne
Man is forming thousands of ridiculous relations between himself and God.

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
It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it.

Michel de Montaigne