Michel de Montaigne - Essays (1580)

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How often our involuntary facial motions testify to the thoughts we were keeping secret, and betray us to those around!

Michel de Montaigne
The religion of my doctor or my lawyer cannot matter. That consideration has nothing in common with the functions of the friendship they owe me.

Michel de Montaigne
Books are pleasant, but if by being over-studious we impair our health and spoil our good humour, two of the best things we have, let us give it over. I, for my part, am one of those who think no fruit derived from them can recompense so great a loss.

Michel de Montaigne
Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.

Michel de Montaigne
No wonder, said an Ancient, that chance has so much power over us, since it is by chance that we live.

Michel de Montaigne
The shortest way to arrive at glory would be to do that for conscience which we do for glory.

Michel de Montaigne
The beginnings of all things are weak and tender. We must therefore be clear-sighted in the beginnings, for, as in their budding we discern not the danger, so in their full growth we perceive not the remedy.

Michel de Montaigne
What fear has once made me will, I am bound still to will when without fear.

Michel de Montaigne
Obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigor and stability.

Michel de Montaigne
I turn my gaze inward. I fix it there and keep it busy. I look inside myself. I continually observe myself.

Michel de Montaigne
There is a certain consideration, and a general duty of humanity, that binds us not only to the animals, which have life and feeling, but even to the trees and plants. We owe justice to people, and kindness and benevolence to all other creatures who may be susceptible of it. There is some intercourse between them and us, and some mutual obligation.

Michel de Montaigne
Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency: a man may very well say a good thing, give a good answer, cite a good sentence, without at all seeing the force of either the one or the other.

Michel de Montaigne
Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.

Michel de Montaigne
There are few things on which we can pass a sincere judgement, because there are few things in which we have not, in one way or another, a particular interest.

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
We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned.

Michel de Montaigne
I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

Michel de Montaigne
I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance.

Michel de Montaigne
Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.

Michel de Montaigne
I admire the assurance and confidence everyone has in himself, whereas there is hardly anything I am sure I know or that I dare give my word I can do.

Michel de Montaigne
For there is no air that men so greedily draw in, that diffuses itself so soon, and that penetrates so deep as that of license.

Michel de Montaigne
Amongst all other vices there is none I hate more than cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extremest of all vices.

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
The common notions that we find in credit around us and infused into our souls by our fathers' seed, these seem to be the universal and natural ones. Whence it comes to pass that what is off the hinges of custom, people believe to be off the hinges of reason.

Michel de Montaigne
A volunteer, you assign yourself specific roles and risks according to your judgement of their brilliance and importance, and you see when life itself may be justifiably devoted to them.

Michel de Montaigne
Who is it that does not voluntarily exchange his health, his repose, and his very life for reputation and glory? The most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes current among us.

Michel de Montaigne
Nature has made us a present of a broad capacity for entertaining ourselves apart, and often calls us to do so, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but in the best part to ourselves.

Michel de Montaigne
The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.

Michel de Montaigne
Whoever will imagine a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgment without leaning or inclination, on any occasion whatever, hasa conception of Pyrrhonism.

Michel de Montaigne
Glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place.

Michel de Montaigne