Top 988 Quotes & Sayings by Michel de Montaigne
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French philosopher Michel de Montaigne.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.
Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.
There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.
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.
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.
He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.
There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.
Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.
Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.
The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.
I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.
The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.
Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.
Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.
If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.
Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.
The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.
Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.
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.
There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge.
The world is but a perpetual see-saw.
The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.
There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.
A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.
I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.
If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.
Ambition is not a vice of little people.
Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.
No pleasure has any savor for me without communication.
Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.
Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one's own goodness.
There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
The thing I fear most is fear.
Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of soul, impossible.
I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.
It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength.
My trade and art is to live.
Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.
The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.
Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.
I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.
Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.
One may be humble out of pride.
There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum.
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