Top 988 Quotes & Sayings by Michel de Montaigne - Page 15

Dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them.

Virtue cannot be followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.

Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of; just as we call "money" not only that which is legal, but also any counterfeit that will pass.

What kind of truth is it which has these mountains as its boundary and is a lie beyond them?

A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted.

If people must be talking about me, I would have it to be truthfully and justly. I would willingly return from the next world to contradict any person who described me other than I was, although he did it to honour me.

Every man may speak truly, but to speak methodically, prudently, and fully is a talent that few men have.

I do not correct my first imaginings by my second--well, yes, perhaps a word or so, but only to vary, not to delete. I want to represent the course of my humors and I want people to see each part at its birth.

If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said.

Habit is second nature.

A little of everything and nothing thoroughly, after the French fashion.

We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?

There is no so wretched and coarse a soul wherein some particular faculty is not seen to shine.

Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end.

No noble thing can be done without risks.

One open way of speaking introduces another open way of speaking, and draws out discoveries, like wine and love.

A hair shirt does not always render those chaste who wear it.

It is the part of cowardice, not of courage, to go and crouch in a hole under a massive tomb, to avoid the blows of fortune.

This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly.

Judgement holds in me a magisterial seat, at least it carefully tries to. It lets my feelings go their way, both hatred and friendship, even the friendship I bear myself, without being changed and corrupted by them.

Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other.

A woman is no sooner ours than we are no longer hers.

It is not without good reason, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.

Marriage can be compared to a cage: birds outside it despair to enter, and birds within, to escape.

I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.

No man is so exquisitely honest or upright in living, but that ten times in his life he might not lawfully be hanged.

What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?

The share we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is, has not been acquired by our own powers. God has taught ushis wonderful secrets; our faith is not of our acquiring, it is purely the gift of another's bounty.

I, who am king of the matter I treat, and who owe an accounting for it to no one, do not for all that believe myself in all I write. I often hazard sallies of my mind which I mistrust.

God defend me from being an honest man according to the description which every day I see made by each man to his own glorification

Children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.

The honor of the conquest is rated by the difficulty.

Few men are admired by their servants.

The concern that some women show at the absence of their husbands, does not arise from their not seeing them and being with them, but from their apprehension that their husbands are enjoying pleasures in which they do not participate, and which, from their being at a distance, they have not the power of interrupting.

There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are great and handsome ornaments, but we buy them too dear.

There is power in ambition, pleasure in luxury...but envy can gain nothing but vexation.

There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees which are falsehoods on the other

Oh, a friend! How true is that old saying, that the enjoyment of one is sweeter and more necessary than that of the elements of water and fire!

Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

How many worthy men have we known to survive their own reputation, who have seen and suffered the honor and glory most justly acquired in their youth, extinguished in their own presence?

Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on credit.

If virtue cannot shine bright, but by the conflict of contrary appetites, shall we then say that she cannot subsist without the assistance of vice, and that it is from her that she derives her reputation and honor?

Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest.

To make judgements about great and lofty things, a soul of the same stature is needed; otherwise we ascribe to them that vice which is our own.

It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.

The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

He was doubtless an understanding Fellow that said, there was no happy Marriage but betwixt a blind Wife and a deaf Husband.

Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another's net.

The strength of any plan depends on the time. Circumstances and things eternally shift and change.

Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like silkworms, and is suffocated in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel...thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered.

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things, and one part is no less necessary than the other.

'As a man who knows how to make his education into a rule of life not a means of showing off; who can control himself and obey his own principles.' The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives.

The beginnings of all things are weak and tender. We must therefore be clear-sighted in the beginnings, for, as in their budding we discern not the danger, so in their full growth we perceive not the remedy.

Nobody is exempt from saying stupid things, the harm is to do it presumptuously.

Give me the provisions and whole apparatus of a kitchen, and I would starve.

We are all of us richer than we think we are.

Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.

No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.

Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.