Michel De Montaigne Quotes

My business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk's sake.

Hath God obliged himself not to exceed the bounds of our knowledge?

Make use of life while you have it. Whether you have lived enough depends upon yourself, not on the number of your years.

Is it not enough to make me come back to life out of spite, to have someone who spat in my face while I existed come and rub my feet when I am beginning to exist no longer?

It costs an unreasonable woman no more to pass over one reason than another; they cherish themselves most where they are most wrong.

The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life.

I consider it equal injustice to set our heart against natural pleasures and to set our heart too much on them. We should neither pursue them, nor flee them; we should accept them.

We may so seize on virtue, that if we embrace it with an overgreedy and violent desire, it may become vicious.

Habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgment.

Experience stands on its own dunghill in medicine, and reason yields it place. Medicine has always professed experience to be the touchstone of its operations.

Children's games are hardly games. Children are never more serious than when they play.

There are few things on which we can pass a sincere judgement, because there are few things in which we have not, in one way or another, a particular interest.

For a desperate disease a desperate cure.

The wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.

All opinions in the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end, although they differ as to the means of attaining it.

What kind of truth is this which is true on one side of a mountain and false on the other?

The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.

I had rather complain of ill-fortune than be ashamed of victory.

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!

Silence and modesty are very valuable qualities in conversation.

Fear sometimes adds wings to the heels, and sometimes nails them to the ground, and fetters them from moving.

There is not one of us that would not be worse than kings, if so continually corrupted as they are with a sort of vermin called flatterers.

A man may be humble through vainglory.

I have ever loved to repose myself, whether sitting or lying, with my heels as high or higher than my head.

To distract myself from tiresome thoughts, I have only to resort to books; they easily draw my mind to themselves and away from other things.

All the opinions in the world point out that pleasure is our aim.

A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children's affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection.

Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.

A foreign war is a lot milder than a civil war.

In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it.

A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.

To philosophize is to doubt.

To die is not to play a part in society; it is the act of a single person. Let us live and laugh among our friends; let us die and sulk among strangers.

A good marriage (if any there be) refuses the conditions of love and endeavors to present those of amity.

I say that male and female are cast in the same mold; except for education and habits, the difference is not great.

We feel a kind of bittersweet pricking of malicious delight in contemplating the misfortunes of others.

The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.

We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.

To understand via the heart is not to understand.

If your doctor does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat of a particular dish, do not worry; I will find you another who will not agree with him.

If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.

Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.

I look upon the too good opinion that man has of himself, as the nursing mother of all false opinions, both public and private.

When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure.

What a wonderful thing it is that drop of seed, from which we are produced, bears in itself the impressions, not only of the bodily shape, but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers!

Custom is a second nature, and no less powerful.

I must accommodate my history to the hour: I may presently change, not only by fortune, but also by intention.

Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than prudent and just.

Let [children] be able to do all things, and love to do only the good.

We should spread joy, but, as far as we can, repress sorrow.