Top 988 Quotes & Sayings by Michel de Montaigne - Page 17

There is a plague on Man, the opinion that he knows something.

This very Rome that we behold deserves our love ...: the only common and universal city.

All the fame you should look for in life is to have lived it quietly.

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.

No profession or occupation is more pleasing than the military; a profession or exercise both noble in execution (for the strongest, most generous and proudest of all virtues is true valor) and noble in its cause. No utility either more just or universal than the protection of the repose or defense of the greatness of one's country. The company and daily conversation of so many noble, young and active men cannot but be well-pleasing to you.

We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear enough and free from clouds.

All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.

To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to 't.

It is the part of cowardliness, and not of virtue, to seek to squat itself in some hollow lurking hole, or to hide herself under some massive tomb, thereby to shun the strokes of fortune.

Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.

The most useful and honorable science and occupation for a woman is the science of housekeeping. I know some that are miserly, very few that are good managers.

If these Essays were worthy of being judged, it might fall out, in my opinion, that they would not find much favour, either with common and vulgar minds, or with uncommon and eminent ones: the former would not find enough in them, the latter would find too much; they might manage to live somewhere in the middle region.

Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work.

It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children.

We seem ambitious God's whole work to undo. ...With new diseases on ourselves we war, And with new physic, a worse engine far.

Meditation is a rich and powerful method of study for anyone who knows how to examine his mind.

It is a small soul, buried beneath the weight of affairs, that does not know how to get clean away from them, that cannot put them aside and pick them up again.

Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.

I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more willfully obstinate.

If my intentions were not to be read in my eyes and voice, I should not have survived so long without quarrels and without harm, seeing the indiscreet freedom with which I say, right or wrong, whatever comes into my head.

I see several animals that live so entire and perfect a life, some without sight, others without hearing: who knows whether to us also one, two, or three, or many other senses, may not be wanting?

A wellborn mind that is practiced in dealing with people makes itself thoroughly agreeable by itself. Art is nothing else but thelist and record of the productions of such minds.

If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they "artialize" nature.

Scratching is one of nature's sweetest gratifications, and nearest at hand.

In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.

Some, either from being glued to vice by a natural attachment, or from long habit, no longer recognize its ugliness.

I see this evident, that we willingly accord to piety only the services that flatter our passions.

Tis so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so.