Michel De Montaigne Quotes & Sayings

#1. I say that male and female are cast in the same mold; except for education and habits, the difference is not great.

Michel De Montaigne

#2. Habit is second nature.

Michel De Montaigne

#3. Not because Socrates said so, ... I look upon all men as my compatriots.

Michel De Montaigne

#4. People of our time are so formed for agitation and ostentation that goodness, moderation, equability, constancy, and such quiet and obscure qualities are no longer felt.

Michel De Montaigne

#5. Examples teach us that in military affairs, and all others of a like nature, study is apt to enervate and relax the courage of man, rather than to give strength and energy to the mind.

Michel De Montaigne

#6. Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.

Michel De Montaigne

#7. The lack of wealth is easily repaired but the poverty of the soul is irreplaceable.

Michel De Montaigne

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

Michel De Montaigne

#9. We call comeliness a mischance in the first respect, which belongs principally to the face.

Michel De Montaigne

#10. For a desperate disease a desperate cure.

Michel De Montaigne

#11. The worth of the mind consisteth not in going high, but in marching orderly.

Michel De Montaigne

#12. Custom is a second nature, and no less powerful.

Michel De Montaigne

#13. It is not the want, but rather abundance that creates avarice.

Michel De Montaigne

#14. May God defend me from myself.

Michel De Montaigne

#15. I am disgusted with innovation, in whatever guise, and with reason, for I have seen very harmful effects of it.

Michel De Montaigne

#16. A man should think less of what he eats and more with whom he eats because no food is so satisfying as good company.

Michel De Montaigne

#17. Have seen no other effects in rods but to make children's minds more remiss or more maliciously headstrong.

Michel De Montaigne

#18. We owe subjection and obedience to all our kings, whether good or bad, alike, for that has respect unto their office; but as to esteem and affection, these are only due to their virtue.

Michel De Montaigne

#19. True it is that she who escapeth safe and unpolluted from out the school of freedom, giveth more confidence of herself than she who comet sound out of the school of severity and restraint.

Michel De Montaigne

#20. Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.

Michel De Montaigne

#21. Perhaps it is not without reason that we attribute facility in belief and conviction to simplicity and ignorance; for it seems to me I once learned that belief was sort of an impression made on our mind, and that the softer it is the less resistant t.

Michel De Montaigne

#22. One may be humble out of pride.

Michel De Montaigne

#23. It is the part of cowardice, not of courage, to go and crouch in a hole under a massive tomb, to avoid the blows of fortune.

Michel De Montaigne

#24. 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

#25. Take care that old age does not wrinkle your spirit even more than your face.

Michel De Montaigne

#26. It is taking one's conjectures rather seriously to roast someone alive for them.

Michel De Montaigne

#27. God defend me from being an honest man according to the description which every day I see made by each man to his own glorification

Michel De Montaigne

#28. Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.

Michel De Montaigne

#29. I, who am king of the matter I treat, and who owe an accounting for it to no one, do not for all that believe myself in all I write. I often hazard sallies of my mind which I mistrust.

Michel De Montaigne

#30. [Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

Michel De Montaigne

#31. Age imprints more wrinkles a in the mind, than it does in the face, and souls are never, or very rarely seen, that in growing old do not smell sour and musty. Man moves all together, both towards his perfection and decay.

Michel De Montaigne

#32. There is power in ambition, pleasure in luxury ... but envy can gain nothing but vexation.

Michel De Montaigne

#33. There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants.

Michel De Montaigne

#34. A speech belongs half to the speaker and half to the listener.

Michel De Montaigne

#35. All opinions in the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end, although they differ as to the means of attaining it.

Michel De Montaigne

#36. 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

#37. The property of Man's wit to act readily and quickly, while the property of the judgement is to be slow and poised.

Michel De Montaigne

#38. Socrates and then Archesilaus used to make their pupils speak first; they spoke afterwards. 'Obest plerumque iss discere volunt authoritas eorum qui docent.' [For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be the authority of those who teach]

Michel De Montaigne

#39. Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the mind as the wish to forget it.

Michel De Montaigne

#40. To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death.

Michel De Montaigne

#41. Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

Michel De Montaigne

#42. To make judgements about great and lofty things, a soul of the same stature is needed; otherwise we ascribe to them that vice which is our own.

Michel De Montaigne

#43. It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children.

Michel De Montaigne

#44. All of the days go toward death and the last one arrives there.

Michel De Montaigne

#45. Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.

Michel De Montaigne

#46. There is a huge gulf between the man who follows the conventions and laws of his country and the man who sets out to regiment them and to change them.

Michel De Montaigne

#47. A man should not so much respect what he eats, as with whom he eats.

Michel De Montaigne

#48. In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum.

Michel De Montaigne

#49. It needs courage to be afraid.

Michel De Montaigne

#50. If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they "artialize" nature.

Michel De Montaigne

#51. Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

Michel De Montaigne

#52. Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

Michel De Montaigne

#53. Between ourselves, there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.

Michel De Montaigne

#54. Hath God obliged himself not to exceed the bounds of our knowledge?

Michel De Montaigne

#55. My art and profession is to live.

Michel De Montaigne

#56. Experience has further taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.

Michel De Montaigne

#57. One should be ever booted and spurred and ready to depart.

Michel De Montaigne

#58. To die is not to play a part in society; it is the act of a single person. Let us live and laugh among our friends; let us die and sulk among strangers.

Michel De Montaigne

#59. The desire for riches is more sharpened by their use than by their need. Pleasing all: a mark that can never be aimed at or hit.

Michel De Montaigne

#60. The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity.

Michel De Montaigne

#61. Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

Michel De Montaigne

#62. The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.

Michel De Montaigne

#63. It is fear that I am most afraid of.

Michel De Montaigne

#64. Thus we should beware of clinging to vulgar opinions, and judge things by reason's way, not by popular say.

Michel De Montaigne

#65. Now there cannot be first principles for men, unless the Divinity has revealed them; all the rest
beginning, middle, and end
isnothing but dreams and smoke.

Michel De Montaigne

#66. Whatever are the benefits of fortune, they yet require a palate fit to relish and taste them.

Michel De Montaigne

#67. Satiety comes of too frequent repetition and he who will not give himself leisure to be thirsty can never find the true pleasure of drinking

Michel De Montaigne

#68. Travelling through the world produces a marvellous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose.

Michel De Montaigne

#69. The more simply we entrust ourself to Nature the more wisely we do so. Oh what a soft and delightful pillow, and what a sane one on which to rest a well-schooled head, are ignorance and unconcern.

Michel De Montaigne

#70. To philosophize is to doubt.

Michel De Montaigne

#71. I do not teach. I relate.

Michel De Montaigne

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.

Michel De Montaigne

#75. We find our energies are actually cramped when we are overanxious to succeed.

Michel De Montaigne

#76. What is it that makes all our quarrels end in death nowadays? Whereas our fathers knew degrees of vengeance we now begin at the end and straightway talk of nothing but killing. What causes that, if not cowardice?

Michel De Montaigne

#77. The relish of good and evil depends in a great measure upon the opinion we have of them.

Michel De Montaigne

#78. How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

Michel De Montaigne

#79. When we have got it, we want something else.

Michel De Montaigne

#80. I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.

Michel De Montaigne

#81. We should spread joy, but, as far as we can, repress sorrow.

Michel De Montaigne

#82. It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

Michel De Montaigne

#83. The man who thinks he knows does not yet know what knowing is

Michel De Montaigne

#84. In our time the most warlike nations are the most rude and ignorant.

Michel De Montaigne

#85. Everything must not always be said, for that would be folly.

Michel De Montaigne

#86. I would rather let affairs break their neck than twist my faith for the sake of them.

Michel De Montaigne

#87. To philosophise is to learn how to die.

Michel De Montaigne

#88. Obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigor and stability.

Michel De Montaigne

#89. Vainglory and curiosity are the twin scourges of our souls. The former makes us stick our noses into everything: the latter forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.

Michel De Montaigne