Michel De Montaigne Quotes

I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will, carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge and lose itself in mine.

~ Michel De Montaigne

We should tend our freedom wisely.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Let us give Nature a chance, she knows her business better than we do.

~ Michel De Montaigne

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

Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favor and esteem for his valor, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished, and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: “Yourself, sir,” replied the other, “by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of my life.

~ Michel De Montaigne

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

~ Michel De Montaigne

Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?

~ Michel De Montaigne

No passion disturbs the soundness of our judgement as anger does.

~ Michel De Montaigne

The natural heat, say the good-fellows,first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middleregion, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Is it that we pretend to a reformation? Truly, no: but it may be we are more addicted to Venus than our fathers were. They are two exercises that thwart and hinder one another in their vigor. Lechery weakens our stomach on the one side; and on the other sobriety renders us more spruce and amorous for the exercise of love.

~ Michel De Montaigne

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.

~ Michel De Montaigne

He lives happy and master of himself who can say as each day passes on, I have lived.

~ Michel De Montaigne

No man is exempt from saying silly things, the mischief is to say them deliberately.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Meditation is a powerful and full study as can effectually taste and employ themselves.

~ Michel De Montaigne

If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men.

~ Michel De Montaigne

I have heard Silvius, an excellent physician of Paris, say that lest the digestive faculties of the stomach should grow idle, it were not amiss once a month to rouse them by this excess, and to spur them lest they should grow dull and rusty; and one author tells us that the Persians used to consult about their mostimportant affairs after being well warmed with wine.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.(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.)

~ Michel De Montaigne

Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing.

~ 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

All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own.

~ Michel De Montaigne

We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.

~ Michel De Montaigne

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

~ Michel De Montaigne

Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience.

~ Michel De Montaigne

A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens.

~ Michel De Montaigne

On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.

~ Michel De Montaigne

We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we can't be wise with another man's wisdom.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their youth...fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober.

~ 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

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.

~ Michel De Montaigne

And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a mind pliable in itself; that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity.

~ Michel De Montaigne

We take our fetters with us, our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind, our imagination is full of them.

~ Michel De Montaigne

A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.

~ Michel De Montaigne

What a prodigious conscience must that be that can be at quiet within itself whilst it harbors under thesame roof, with so agreeing and so calm a society, both the crime and the judge?

~ Michel De Montaigne

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

~ Michel De Montaigne

This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at nineteen, and yet would have a man to be thirty before he could be fit to determine a dispute about a gutter.

~ Michel De Montaigne