Michel de Montaigne - Truth Quotes

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If falsehood, like truth, had one face, we should know better where we are, for we should then take for certain the opposite of what the liar tells us.

Michel de Montaigne
How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?

Michel de Montaigne
In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it.

Michel de Montaigne
Truth and reason are common to everyone, and are no more his who spake them first than his who speaks them after.

Michel de Montaigne
The share we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is, has not been acquired by our own powers. God has taught ushis wonderful secrets; our faith is not of our acquiring, it is purely the gift of another's bounty.

Michel de Montaigne
The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man persuades another man to believe.

Michel de Montaigne
What kind of truth is this which is true on one side of a mountain and false on the other?

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
Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in

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 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
It was truly very good reason that we should be beholden to God only, and to the favour of his grace, for the truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal beatitude.... The more we give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater Christianity.

Michel de Montaigne
I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older.

Michel de Montaigne
Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.

Michel de Montaigne
It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.

Michel de Montaigne
Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.

Michel de Montaigne
For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts.

Michel de Montaigne
I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

Michel de Montaigne
Teach him a certain refinement in sorting out and selecting his arguments, with an affection for relevance and so for brevity. Above all let him be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether the truth is born at his rival's doing or within himself from some change in his ideas.

Michel de Montaigne
We are born to inquire after truth; it belongs to a greater power to possess it. It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine knowledge.

Michel de Montaigne
Health is a precious thing, and the only one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out not only his time, sweat, labor and goods, but also life itself to obtain it.

Michel de Montaigne
What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?

Michel de Montaigne
For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.

Michel de Montaigne
In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.

Michel de Montaigne
I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.

Michel de Montaigne
Now, since everything else is furnished with the exact amount of needle and thread required to maintain its being, it is in truth incredible that we alone should be brought into the world in a defective and indigent state, in a state such that we cannot maintain ourselves without external aid.

Michel de Montaigne
The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.

Michel de Montaigne