Michel de Montaigne - Essays (1580)

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We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us.

Michel de Montaigne
The worth of the mind consisteth not in going high, but in marching orderly.

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

Michel de Montaigne
I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.

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

Michel de Montaigne
Vice leaves repentance in the soul, like an ulcer in the flesh, which is always scratching and lacerating itself; for reason effaces all other griefs and sorrows, but it begets that of repentance.

Michel de Montaigne
My opinion is that we must lend ourselves to others and give ourselves only to ourselves. If my will happened to be prone to mortgage and attach itself, I would not last: I am too tender, both by nature and by practice.

Michel de Montaigne
If these Essays were worthy of being judged, it might fall out, in my opinion, that they would not find much favour, either with common and vulgar minds, or with uncommon and eminent ones: the former would not find enough in them, the latter would find too much; they might manage to live somewhere in the middle region.

Michel de Montaigne
The dispersing and scattering our names into many mouths, we call making them more great.

Michel de Montaigne
It is not my deeds that I write down, it is myself, my essence.

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
If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said.

Michel de Montaigne
If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself.

Michel de Montaigne
I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we willhave sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.

Michel de Montaigne