QUOTES by Michel Montaigne
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“We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we can't be wise with another man's wisdom.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“A noble heart should not belie its thoughts; it wants to reveal itself even to its inmost depths. There everything is good, at least everything is human.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“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?”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again...books which I have read carefully a few years before. I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Meditation is a powerful and full study as can effectually taste and employ themselves.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“I know no marriages which fail and come to grief more quickly than those which are set on foot by beauty and amorous desire.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“If any one should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I feel it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer, ‘Because it was he; because it was I.’ There is, beyond what I am able to say, I know not what inexplicable and inevitable power that brought on this union.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“The most beautiful lives, to my mind,are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle, and without eccentricity.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Men have seemed miraculous to the world, in whom their wives and valets have never seen anything even worth noticing. Few men have been admired by their own households.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“That is why Bias jested with those who were going through the perils of a great storm with him and calling on the gods for help: "Shut up," he said, "so that they do not realize that you are here with me.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“This, reader, is an honest book...I want to appear in my simple, natural and everyday dress, without strain or artifice; for it is myself that I portray”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“The pettiest and slightest nuisances are the most acute; and as small letters hurt and tire the eyes most, so do trifling matters sting us most.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Death is not one of our social managements; it is a scene with one character.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood.... I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing; we must learn that we are nothing but fools, a far broader and more important lesson.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“In general I ask for books that make use of learning, not those that build it up.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“The man who establishes his argument by noise and command knows that his reason is weak.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“What hits you affects you and wakes you up more then what pleases you.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn into beast; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible heights.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe, we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Such as are in immediate fear of a losing their estates, of banishment, or of slavery, live in perpetual anguish, and lose all appetite and repose; whereas such as are actually poor, slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well...”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among the friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Natural inclinations are assisted and reinforced by education, but they are hardly ever altered or overcome.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“It is only certain that there is nothing certain, and that nothing is more miserable or more proud than man.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“No one should be subjected to force over things which belonged to him.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Better to be tentative than to be recklessly sure- to be an apprentice at sixty, than to present oneself as a doctor at ten.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne
“Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.”
Quote by -Michel Montaigne