Michel de Montaigne > Quotes

“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“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 to better express myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“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, Les Essais

“Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
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― Michel de Montaigne

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”
― 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

“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Montaigne: Essays

“I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”
― Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond

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

“The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. ”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.”
― 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

“My art and profession is to live.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“In nine lifetimes, you'll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Que sçais-je?" (What do I know?)”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!”
― 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

“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, The Complete Essays

“I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other”
― Michel de Montaigne

“The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Saying is one thing and doing is another”
― 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

“Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“No-one is exempt from speaking nonsense – the only misfortune is to do it solemnly.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.”
― 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, The Complete Essays

“Every man has within himself the entire human condition”
― 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

“Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Montaigne: Essays

“Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“I had rather fashion my mind than furnish it.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection

“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, Montaigne: Essays

“Il n'est pas de chagrin qu'un livre ne puisse consoler.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Why do people respect the package rather than the man?”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“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, The Complete Essays

“Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and make it part of himself, judging the boy's progress by what Plato taught about education. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection

“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.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“There is indeed a certain sense of gratification when we do a good deed that gives us inward satisfaction, and a generous pride that accompanies a good conscience…These testimonies of a good conscience are pleasant; and such a natural pleasure is very beneficial to us; it is the only payment that can never fail. “On Repentance”
― Michel de Montaigne