Top 100 Montaigne's Quotes
#1. To die from 'a draining away of one's strength caused by extreme old age' was in Montaigne's day a 'rare, singular and extraordinary death.' Nowadays we assume it as our right.
Julian Barnes
#2. (A writer's working space, Montaigne also believed, ought to have a good view of the cemetery; it tended to sharpen one's thinking.)
Oliver Burkeman
#3. We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we can't be wise with another man's wisdom.
Michel De Montaigne
#4. We seem ambitious God's whole work to undo ... With new diseases on ourselves we war, And with new physic, a worse engine far.
Michel De Montaigne
#5. 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
#6. I want us to be doing things, prolonging life's duties as much as we can. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.
Michel De Montaigne
#7. The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.
Michel De Montaigne
#8. Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.
Michel De Montaigne
#9. It is taking one's conjectures rather seriously to roast someone alive for them.
Michel De Montaigne
#10. I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's.
Michel De Montaigne
#12. To speak less of oneself than what one really is, is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under a man's value, is pusillanimity and cowardice.
Michel De Montaigne
#13. Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.
Michel De Montaigne
#14. We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
Michel De Montaigne
#15. For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
Michel De Montaigne
#16. Scratching is one of nature's sweetest gratifications, and the one nearest at hand.
Michel De Montaigne
#17. And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.
Michel De Montaigne
#18. It is an absolute perfection ... to get the very most out of one's individuality.
Michel De Montaigne
#19. If not for that of conscience, yet at least for ambition's sake, let us reject ambition, let us disdain that thirst of honor and renown, so low and mendicant; that it makes us beg it of all sorts of people.
Michel De Montaigne
#20. Have seen no other effects in rods but to make children's minds more remiss or more maliciously headstrong.
Michel De Montaigne
#21. Every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be.
Michel De Montaigne
#22. [Sweet it is during a tempest when the gales lash the waves to watch from the shore another man's great striving.]3
Michel De Montaigne
#23. To censure my own faults in some other person seems to me no more incongruous than to censure, as I often do, another's in myself. They must be denounced everywhere, and be allowed no place of sanctuary.
Michel De Montaigne
#24. The share we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is, has not been acquired by our own powers. God has taught ushis wonderful secrets; our faith is not of our acquiring, it is purely the gift of another's bounty.
Michel De Montaigne
#25. Though we may be learned by another's knowledge, we can never be wise but by our own experience.
Michel De Montaigne
#26. Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.
Michel De Montaigne
#27. My business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk's sake.
Michel De Montaigne
#29. I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man's estate.
Michel De Montaigne
#30. Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another's net.
Michel De Montaigne
#31. Seneca's virtue shows forth so live and vigorous in his writings, and the defense is so clear there against some of these imputations, as that of his wealth and excessive spending, that I would not believe any testimony to the contrary.
Michel De Montaigne
#32. Diogenes was asked what wine he liked best; and he answered as I would have done when he said, "Somebody else's".
Michel De Montaigne
#33. The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.
Michel De Montaigne
#34. I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary's force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.
Michel De Montaigne
#35. 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
#36. Thus we should beware of clinging to vulgar opinions, and judge things by reason's way, not by popular say.
Michel De Montaigne
#37. There is nothing in which a horse's power is better revealed than in a neat, clean stop.
Michel De Montaigne
#38. We are all of us richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow and to beg, and brought up more to make use of what is another's than of our own.
Michel De Montaigne
#39. Let's say I have a mystical soul and a rational brain, and, like Montaigne, I am incapable of choosing between them. I don't know if I believe in God, but I am often tempted to believe.
Francois Mitterrand
#40. Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one's own goodness.
Michel De Montaigne
#41. Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.
Michel De Montaigne
#43. It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.
Michel De Montaigne
#44. A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children's affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection.
Michel De Montaigne
#46. We endeavor more that men should speak of us, than how and what they speak, and it sufficeth us that our name run in men's mouths, in what manner soever. It stemma that to be known is in some sort to have life and continuance in other men's keeping.
Michel De Montaigne
#47. Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.
Michel De Montaigne
#48. I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and reason, as the worst of all the vices. But then I am so soft in this that I cannot seea chicken's neck wrung without distress, and cannot bear to hear the squealing of a hare between the teeth of my hounds.
Michel De Montaigne
#50. Children's games are hardly games. Children are never more serious than when they play.
Michel De Montaigne
#51. There is a certain amount of purpose, acquiescence, and satisfaction in nursing one's melancholy.
Michel De Montaigne
#52. 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
#54. Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.
Michel De Montaigne
#55. Not because Socrates said so, ... I look upon all men as my compatriots.
Michel De Montaigne
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#61. And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one.
Michel De Montaigne
#62. 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
#64. We are Christians by the same title as we are natives of Perigord or Germany.
Michel De Montaigne
#65. 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
#66. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.
Michel De Montaigne
#67. 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
#68. Tis faith alone that vividly and certainly comprehends the deep mysteries of our religion.
Michel De Montaigne
#69. 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
#70. Those who have compared our life to a dream were right ... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
Michel De Montaigne
#71. He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying.
Michel De Montaigne
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
Michel De Montaigne
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. I'm quite influenced in this by one of my heroes, Montaigne, who thought a man's real task was to render as honest an account of himself as he could.
Robert Sheckley
#81. 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
#82. If I can, I will prevent my death from saying anything not first said by my life.
Michel De Montaigne
#83. The Stoics forbid this emotion to their sages as being base and cowardly.
Michel De Montaigne
#84. Wisdom is a solid and entire building, of which every piece keeps its place and bears its mark.
Michel De Montaigne
#85. Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.
Michel De Montaigne
#86. All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own.
Michel De Montaigne
#87. I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.
Michel De Montaigne
#89. Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb." - Seneca, Hippolytus, act ii. scene 3.] A
Michel De Montaigne
#91. There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are great and handsome ornaments, but we buy them too dear.
Michel De Montaigne
#92. Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.
Michel De Montaigne
#93. There is nothing on which men are commonly more intent than on making a way for their opinions.
Michel De Montaigne
#95. The most evident token and apparent sign of true wisdom is a constant and unconstrained rejoicing.
Michel De Montaigne
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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