Michel de Montaigne - Man Quotes

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He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

Michel de Montaigne
The daughter-in-law of Pythagoras said that a woman who goes to bed with a man ought to lay aside her modesty with her skirt, and put it on again with her petticoat

Michel de Montaigne
A man must live in the world and make the best of it, such as it is.

Michel de Montaigne
Man will rise, if God by exception lends him a hand; he will rise by abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himselfbe raised and uplifted by purely celestial means.

Michel de Montaigne
Presumption is our natural and original malady. The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant.

Michel de Montaigne
A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid.

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

Michel de Montaigne
A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.
In French: L'homme d'entendement n'a rien perdu, s'il a soi-même.

Michel de Montaigne
And I loathe people who find it harder to put up with a gown askew than with a soul askew and who judge a man by his bow, his bearing and his boots.

Michel de Montaigne
Aesop, that great man, saw his master making water as he walked. "What!" he said, "Must we void ourselves as we run?" Use our timeas best we may, yet a great part of it will still be idly and ill spent.

Michel de Montaigne
Plato says, "'T is to no purpose for a sober man to knock at the door of the Muses;" and Aristotle says "that no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of folly."

Michel de Montaigne
A learned man is not learned in all things; but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout, even to ignorance itself.

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

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
To call out for the hand of the enemy is a rather extreme measure, yet a better one, I think, than to remain in continual fever over an accident that has no remedy. But since all the precautions that a man can take are full of uneasiness and uncertainty, it is better to prepare with fine assurance for the worst that can happen, and derive some consolation from the fact that we are not sure that it will happen.

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
The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.

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
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
A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.

Michel de Montaigne
Whatever is preached to us, and whatever we learn, we should still remember that it is man that gives, and man that receives; it is a mortal hand that presents it to us, it is a mortal hand that accepts it.

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

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
The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge.

Michel de Montaigne
But the touch or company of any man whatsoever stirreth up their heat, which in their solitude was hushed and quiet, and lay as cinders raked up in ashes.

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

Michel de Montaigne
Surely man is a being wonderfully vain, changeable, and vacillating.

Michel de Montaigne
Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

Michel de Montaigne