Michel De Montaigne Quotes
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.
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.
Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.
We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.
~The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them ~
The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
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.
The daughter-in-law of Pythagoras said that a woman who goes to bed with a man ought to lay aside her modesty with her skirt, and put it on again with her petticoat
Man is quite insane. He wouldn?t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.
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.
We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.
My home...It is my retreat and resting place from wars, I try to keep this corner as a haven against the tempest outside, as I do another corner in my soul.
I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.
There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants.
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he, and I was I.
He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
When all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; his accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never.
Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.
Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.
The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.
I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other
The lack of wealth is easily repaired but the poverty of the soul is irreplaceable.
