QUOTES by Michel Montaigne
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“I do not think that there is so much wretchedness in us as vanity; we are not so much wicked as daft; we are not so much full of evil as of inanity; we are not so much pitiful as despicable.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it solemnly”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him."
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will, carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge and lose itself in mine.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“No one is exempt from speaking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“A person of honor chooses to loss his honor rather than his consicience”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Our understanding is conducted solely by means of the word: anyone who falsifies it betrays public society. It is the only tool by which we communicate our wishes and our thoughts; it is our soul’s interpreter: if we lack that, we can no longer hold together; we can no longer know each other. When words deceive us, it breaks all intercourse and loosens the bonds of our polity.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“We thought we were tying our marriage-knots more tightly by removing all means of undoing them;22 but the tighter we pulled the knot of constraint the looser and slacker became the knot of our will and affection. In Rome, on the contrary, what made marriages honoured and secure for so long a period was freedom to break them at will. Men loved their wives more because they could lose them; and during a period when anyone was quite free to divorce, more than five hundred years went by before a single one did”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“I care not so much what I am in the opinion of others, as what I am in my own.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“There is nothing more unsociable than man, and nothing more sociable: unsociable by his vice, sociable by his nature.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Friendship on the contrary is enjoyed in proportion to our desire: since it is a matter of the mind, with our souls being purified by practising it”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me. ”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“The time is now proper for us to reform backward; more by dissenting than by agreeing; by differing more than by consent.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“I know nothing about education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my garden not being finished. (tr. Charles Cotton)”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Whether we are running our home or studying or hunting or following any other sport, we should go to the very boundaries of pleasure but take good care not to be involved beyond the point where it begins to be mingled with pain.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“There is an old Greek saying that men are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them. If that assertion could be proved to be always true everywhere it would be an important point gained of the comforting of our wretched human condition. For if ills can only enter us through our judgemente it would seem to be in our power either to despise them or to deflect them towards the good: if the things actually do trow themselves on our mercy why do we not act as their masters and accomodate them to our advantage? If what we call evil or torment are only evil or torment insofar as our mental apprehension endows them with those qualities when it lies within our power to change those qualities. And if we did have such a choice and were free from constraint we would be curiously mad to pull in the direction which hurst us most, endowing sickness, poverty or insolence with a bad and bitter taste when we could give them a pleasent one, Fortune simply furnishing us with the matter and leaving it to us to supply the form. Let us see whether a case can be made for what we call evil not being an evil in itself or (since it amounts to the same) whether at least it is up to us to endow it with a different savour and aspect.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgement as doth anger”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgement as doth anger”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“If I had even the slightest grasp upon my own faculties, I would not make essays, I would make decisions.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“You never speak about yourself without loss. Your self-condemnation is always accredited, your self-praise discredited. There may be some people of my temperament, I who learn better by contrast than by example, and by flight than by pursuit. This was the sort of teaching that Cato the Elder had in view when he said that the wise have more to learn from the fools than the fools from the wise; and also that ancient lyre player who, Pausanias tells us, was accustomed to force his pupils to go hear a bad musician who lived across the way, where they might learn to hate his discords and false measures.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“A man of genius belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of nature, which is always everywhere the same.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Handling and use by able minds give value to a language, not so much by innovating as by filling it out with more vigorous and varied services, by stretching and bending it.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be – even when we ourselves shall be no more. [C] ‘Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius’ [Wretched is a mind anxious about the future].”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere is to be nowhere.es”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Marriage is like a cage one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out...”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything doubtful and undecided.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“ I once took pleasure some place in seeing men, through piety, take a vow of ignorance, as of chastity, poverty, penitence. It is also castrating our disorderly appetites, to blunt that cupidity that pricks us on to the study of books, and to deprive the soul of that voluptuous complacency which tickles us with the notion of being learned.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Truth for us nowadays is not what is, but what others can be brought to accept: just as we call money not only legal tender but any counterfeit coins in circulation.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“If anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot. If he gets into some flattering presumption about his valor, let him remember the lives of the two Scipios, so many armies, so many nations, all of whom leave him so far behind them. No particular quality will make a man proud who balances it against the many weaknesses and imperfections that are also in him, and, in the end, against the nullity of man’s estate.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“I seek in the reading of my books only to please myself by an irreproachable diversion; or if I study it is for no other science than that which treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and live well.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“I have not seen anywhere in the world a more obvious malformed person and miracle than myself. Through use and time we become conditioned to anything strange; but the more I become familiar with and know myself, the more my deformity amazes me and the less I understand myself.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne