Michel De Montaigne Quotes

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“Saying is one thing and doing is another.”

“We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.”

“Other people do not see you at all, but guess at you by uncertain conjectures.”

“It is a disaster that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and always sends you away dissatisfied and fearful, whereas stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy and assurance.”

“I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.”

“The thing I fear most is fear.”

“Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.”

“Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own.”

“Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.”

“I had rather fashion my mind than furnish it.”

“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.”

“The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness.”

“To distract myself from tiresome thoughts, I have only to resort to books; they easily draw my mind to themselves and away from other things.”

“When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing.”

“There are no truths, only moments of claryty passing for answers.”

“Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies.”

“Let every foot have its own shoe.”

“Pride and curiosity are the two scourges of our souls. The latter prompts us to poke our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.”

“There is no more expensive thing than a free gift.”

“The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them… Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.”

“A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.”

“The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live with purpose.”

“The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold…The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.”

“Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.”

“Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.”

“A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid.”

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”

“Why may not a goose say thus: "All the parts of the universe I have an interest in: the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favourably as me. I am the darling of Nature! Is it not man that keeps and serves me?"”

“I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it.”

“Man in sooth is a marvellous, vain, fickle, and unstable subject.”

“So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation.”

“I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.”

“I moreover affirm that our wisdom itself, and wisest consultations, for the most part commit themselves to the conduct of chance.”

“We seek and offer ourselves to be gulled.”

“I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.”

“Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.”

“In my opinion, every rich man is a miser.”

“Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest.”

“To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.”

“God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand”

“There is nothing so easy, so sweet, and so favourable, as the divine law: it calls and invites us to her, guilty and abominable as we are; extends her arms and receives us into her bosom, foul and polluted as we at present are, and are for the future to be. But then, in return, we are to look upon her with a respectful eye; we are to receive this pardon with all gratitude and submission, and for that instant at least, wherein we address ourselves to her, to have the soul sensible of the ills we have committed, and at enmity with those passions that seduced us to offend her;”

“The sage says that all that is under heaven incurs the same law and the same fate.”

“The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.”

“He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying.”

“It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.”

“Like rowers, who advance backward.”

“We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.”

“She [virtue] requires a rough and stormy passage; she will have either outward difficulties to wrestle with, 11 … or internal difficulties.”

“There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.”