Michel de Montaigne - Essays (1580)

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After a tongue has once got the knack of lying, it is not to be imagined how impossible almost it is to reclaim it. Whence it comes to pass, that we see some men, who are otherwise very honest, so subject to this vice.

Michel de Montaigne
I was not long since in a company where I was not who of my fraternity brought news of a kind of pills, by true account, composed of a hundred and odd several ingredients; whereat we laughed very heartily, and made ourselves good sport; for what rock so hard were able to resist the shock or withstand the force of so thick and numerous a battery?

Michel de Montaigne
In my youth I studied for ostentation; later, a little to gain wisdom; now, for recreation; never for gain.

Michel de Montaigne
It makes me hate accepting things that are probable when they are held up before me as infallibly true. I prefer these words which tone down and modify the hastiness of our propositions: "Perhaps, In some sort, Some, They say, I think," and the like.

Michel de Montaigne
We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear enough and free from clouds.

Michel de Montaigne
Authors communicate with the people by some special extrinsic mark; I am the first to do so by my entire being, as Michel de Montaigne.

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

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
If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.

Michel de Montaigne
Our speech has its weaknesses and its defects, like all the rest. Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.

Michel de Montaigne
Have you known how to take rest? You have done more than he who hath taken empires and cities.

Michel de Montaigne
Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from whathe is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.

Michel de Montaigne
It is indeed the boundary of life, beyond which we are not to pass; which the law of nature has pitched for a limit not to be exceeded.

Michel de Montaigne
I love a gay and sociable wisdom, and shun harshness and austerity in behaviour, holding every surly countenance suspect.

Michel de Montaigne
Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.

Michel de Montaigne
Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping themselves always in show, like the statue of a public place.

Michel de Montaigne
Even in the midst of compassion we feel within I know not what tart sweet titillation of malicious pleasure in seeing others suffer; children have the same feeling.

Michel de Montaigne