“The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. ”
― Michel de Montaigne
“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
―Michel de Montaigne
“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Learned we may be with another man’s learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Combien de choses nous servoyent hier d’articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd’huy?
How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?”
― Michel de Montaigne
“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
“Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death… We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere.”
“To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“My art and profession is to live.”
―Michel de Montaigne
“There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Confidence in others’ honesty is no light testimony of one’s own integrity.”
― michel de montaigne
“The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Every man has within himself the entire human condition”
― Michel de Montaigne
“He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head”
― Michel de Montaigne
“[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Every movement reveals us.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Not being able to govern events, I govern myself”
― Michel de Montaigne
“There is no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Que sçais-je?” (What do I know?)”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Kings and philosophers shit—and so do ladies.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“No wind favors he who has no destined port.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other”
― Montaigne
“I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“Why do people respect the package rather than the man?”
― Michel de Montaigne
“No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.”
― Michel de Montaigne
“There is no desire more natural than the desire of knowledge. (Il n’est desir plus naturel que le desir de connaissance)”
― Michel de Montaigne