The Complete Works Quotes

“The soul in which philosophy dwells should by its health make even the body healthy. It should make its tranquillity and gladness shine out from within; should form in its own mold the outward demeanor, and consequently arm it with a graceful pride, an active and joyous bearing, and a contented and good-natured countenance. The surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.

I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.

Thus Diogenes, who pottered about by himself, rolling his tub and turning up his nose at the great Alexander, considering us as flies or bags of wind, was really a sharper and more stinging judge, to my taste, than Timon, who was surnamed the hater of men. For what we hate we take seriously. Timon wished us ill, passionately desired our ruin, shunned association with us as dangerous, as with wicked men depraved by nature. Diogenes esteemed us so little that contact with us could neither disturb him nor affect him, and avoided our company, not through fear of association with us, but through disdain of it; he considered us incapable of doing either good or evil....

Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle's principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicureans. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured. For if he embraces Xenophon's and Plato's opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. He who follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing; indeed he seeks nothing. We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom. Let him know that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later. It is no more according to Plato than according to me, since he and I understand and see it the same way. The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“I seek in the reading of my books only to please myself by an irreproachable diversion; or if I study it is for no other science than that which treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and live well.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“If anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot. If he gets into some flattering presumption about his valor, let him remember the lives of the two Scipios, so many armies, so many nations, all of whom leave him so far behind them. No particular quality will make a man proud who balances it against the many weaknesses and imperfections that are also in him, and, in the end, against the nullity of man’s estate.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“I speak the truth not so much as I want, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“You never speak about yourself without loss. Your self-condemnation is always accredited, your self-praise discredited. There may be some people of my temperament, I who learn better by contrast than by example, and by flight than by pursuit. This was the sort of teaching that Cato the Elder had in view when he said that the wise have more to learn from the fools than the fools from the wise; and also that ancient lyre player who, Pausanias tells us, was accustomed to force his pupils to go hear a bad musician who lived across the way, where they might learn to hate his discords and false measures.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“Que sçay-je? (What do I know?)”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“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, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears.”
― Michael de Montaigne, The Complete Works of Michael de Montaigne; Comprising the Essays

“I have no doubt that I often happen to speak of things that are better treated by the masters of the craft, and more truthfully. This is purely the essay of my natural facilities, and not at all acquired ones; and whoever shall catch me in ignorance will do nothing against me, for I should hardly be answerable for my ideas to others, I who am not answerable for them to myself, or satisfied with them. Whoever is in search of knowledge, let him fish for it where it dwells, there is nothing I profess less. These are my fancies, by which I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“Also it is forbidden to all prostitutes and immodest women to enter the baths, or to be found within five hundred paces of the same under penalty of a whipping at the four corners of the town. And the householders who shall receive or conceal them shall incur the pain of imprisonment and arbitrary fine.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne

“Afterwards, having gone to Montirandet, and still following the weavers calling, she fell in love again with a certain woman, with whom she married and lived, as the story goes, contentedly four or five months. But, having been recognised by some one living at Chaumont, and the matter having been brought to the notice of the courts, she was condemned to be hanged; whereupon she Montier-en-Der. declared she would liefer suffer thus than live a woman’s life. She was hanged on the charge of using unlawful appliances to remedy the defects of her sex.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne

“.. Monsieur de Montaigne sent Monsieur Mattecoulon (For notice of Mattecoulon and D’Estissac, see Introduction.)  with his squire by post to pay a visit to the count”
― Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne

“When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly; and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticise us perform a remarkable act of friendship; for to undertake to wound and offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters