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Michel de Montaigne Quotes: 26

  • Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

  • If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.

  • The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

  • 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.

    The Complete Essays

  • I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.

  • I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

    The Complete Essays

  • When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

    Les Essais

  • Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.

    The Complete Essays

  • If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

    The Complete Essays

  • 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 Complete Essays

  • Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.

    The Complete Essays

  • Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

    The Complete Essays

  • Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.

  • The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.

    The Essays: A Selection

  • [Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

    The Complete Essays

  • There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.

  • I listen with attention to the judgment of all men;but so far as I can remember,I have followed none but my own.

  • Why do people respect the package rather than the man?

    The Complete Essays

  • It is a disaster that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and always sends you away dissatisfied and fearful, whereas stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy and assurance.

    The Complete Essays

  • Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.

    The Complete Essays

  • Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.

    The Complete Essays

  • There is indeed a certain sense of gratification when we do a good deed that gives us inward satisfaction, and a generous pride that accompanies a good conscience…These testimonies of a good conscience are pleasant; and such a natural pleasure is very beneficial to us; it is the only payment that can never fail. “On Repentance

  • We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.

    The Complete Essays

  • The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.

  • Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.