Top 100 De Montaigne Quotes
#1. As Michel de Montaigne observed, "The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced."
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Gretchen Rubin
#2. I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures. - MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Anthony Robbins
#3. The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.
Michel de Montaigne
Laurie Stevens
#4. The conduct of our lives is the true reflection of our thoughts. - MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Gretchen Rubin
#5. Quotations are powerful tools. Michel de Montaigne, the father of all essayists, observed, 'I quote others only to better express myself.' Intrepid quotations detective Ralph Keyes helps us to discover the clear truth about exactly what was said and who exactly said it.
Richard Lederer
#6. For centuries censorship has created best sellers because, as Michel de Montaigne said, 'To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.' (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)
Margaret Bald
#7. 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
#8. If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. - Michel de Montaigne, "That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die
Paul Kalanithi
#9. Sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne once wrote, When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?
Michio Kaku
#10. As Michel de Montaigne observed, "No wind favors him who has no destined port.
John C. Maxwell
#11. This great world of ours is the looking-glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves from the right slant. Michel de Montaigne
Patti Miller
#12. Get a purge for your brain. It will do better than for your stomach. - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
David Allen
#13. 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
#14. We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
Michel De Montaigne
#15. The recognition of virtue is not less valuable from the lips of the man who hates it, since truth forces him to acknowledge it; and though he may be unwilling to take it into his inmost soul, he at least decks himself out in its trappings.
Michel De Montaigne
#16. 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
#17. It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
Michel De Montaigne
#18. He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying.
Michel De Montaigne
#19. Those who have compared our life to a dream were right ... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
Michel De Montaigne
#20. Knowledge is an excellent drug; but no drug has virtue enough to preserve itself from corruption and decay, if the vessel be tainted and impure wherein it is put to keep.
Michel De Montaigne
#21. Tis faith alone that vividly and certainly comprehends the deep mysteries of our religion.
Michel De Montaigne
#22. He that first likened glory to a shadow did better than he was aware of. They are both of them things excellently vain. Glory also, like a shadow, goes sometimes before the body, and sometimes in length infinitely exceeds it.
Michel De Montaigne
#23. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.
Michel De Montaigne
#24. Those sciences which govern the morals of mankind, such as Theology and Philosophy, make everything their concern: no activity is so private or so secret as to escape their attention or their jurisdiction.
Michel De Montaigne
#25. We are Christians by the same title as we are natives of Perigord or Germany.
Michel De Montaigne
#27. If I am to serve as an instrument of deceit, at least let it be with a clear conscience. I do not want to be considered either so affectionate or so loyal a servant as to be found fit to betray anyone.
Michel De Montaigne
#28. And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one.
Michel De Montaigne
#30. The first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die ... and to live.
Michel De Montaigne
#31. Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world? I cannot keep a record of my life by my actions; fortune places them too low. I keep it by my thoughts.
Michel De Montaigne
#32. A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.
Michel De Montaigne
#34. Not because Socrates said so, ... I look upon all men as my compatriots.
Michel De Montaigne
#35. Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.
Michel De Montaigne
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. An able reader often discovers in other people's writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.
Michel De Montaigne
#40. It is quite normal to see good intentions, when not carried out with moderation, urging men to actions which are truly vicious.
Michel De Montaigne
#42. The most evident token and apparent sign of true wisdom is a constant and unconstrained rejoicing.
Michel De Montaigne
#44. There is nothing on which men are commonly more intent than on making a way for their opinions.
Michel De Montaigne
#45. Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.
Michel De Montaigne
#46. There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are great and handsome ornaments, but we buy them too dear.
Michel De Montaigne
#48. It is in vain that we get upon stilts, for once on them, it is still with our legs that we must walk. And on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own ass.
Michel De Montaigne
#50. I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.
Michel De Montaigne
#51. All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own.
Michel De Montaigne
#52. Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.
Michel De Montaigne
#53. Wisdom is a solid and entire building, of which every piece keeps its place and bears its mark.
Michel De Montaigne
#54. The Stoics forbid this emotion to their sages as being base and cowardly.
Michel De Montaigne
#55. If I can, I will prevent my death from saying anything not first said by my life.
Michel De Montaigne
#56. Oh, what a valiant faculty is hope, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying its masters indigence, at its pleasure, with all things he can imagine or desire!
Michel De Montaigne
#58. 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
#59. Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb." - Seneca, Hippolytus, act ii. scene 3.] A
Michel De Montaigne
#60. Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.
Michel De Montaigne
#61. The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure no slight pleasure.
Michel De Montaigne
#63. Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art.
Michel De Montaigne
#64. The lack of wealth is easily repaired but the poverty of the soul is irreplaceable.
Michel De Montaigne
#65. 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
#66. If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.
Michel De Montaigne
#67. 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
#68. In order always to learn something from others (which is the finest school there can be), I observe in my travels this practice: I always steer those with whom I talk back to the things they know best.
Michel De Montaigne
#70. After mature deliberation of counsel, the good Queen to establish a rule and immutable example unto all posterity, for the moderation and required modesty in a lawful marriage, ordained the number of six times a day as a lawful, necessary and competent limit.
Michel De Montaigne
#71. I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.
Michel De Montaigne
#72. Women are not altogether in the wrong when they refuse the rules of life prescribed to the World, for men only have established them and without their consent.
Michel De Montaigne
#73. Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.
Michel De Montaigne
#74. For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness.
Michel De Montaigne
#75. Have you known how to take rest? You have done more than he who hath taken empires and cities.
Michel De Montaigne
#76. We took advantage of [the Indians'] ignorance and inexperience to incline them the more easily toward treachery, lewdness, avarice, and every sort of inhumanity and cruelty, after the example and pattern of our ways.
Michel De Montaigne
#77. Princes give me sufficiently if they take nothing from me, and do me much good if they do me no hurt; it is all I require of them.
Michel De Montaigne
#78. We call comeliness a mischance in the first respect, which belongs principally to the face.
Michel De Montaigne
#80. We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.
Michel De Montaigne
#86. Marriage can be compared to a cage: birds outside it despair to enter, and birds within, to escape.
Michel De Montaigne
#87. We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say?
Michel De Montaigne
#88. Fortune, to show us her power in all things, and to abate our presumption, seeing she could not make fools wise, has made them fortunate.
Michel De Montaigne
#89. And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?
Michel De Montaigne
#90. What hits you affects you and wakes you up more then what pleases you.
Michel De Montaigne
#91. Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than prudent and just.
Michel De Montaigne
#93. There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.
Michel De Montaigne
#94. O human creature,you are the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and all in all, the fool of the farce.
Michel De Montaigne
#95. 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
#99. The receipts of cookery are swelled to a volume, but a good stomach excels them all; to which nothing contributes more than industry and temperance.
Michel De Montaigne
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