Michel de Montaigne
Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.Collection: Order
In order always to learn something from others (which is the finest school there can be), I observe in my travels this practice: I always steer those with whom I talk back to the things they know best.Collection: Travel
We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.Collection: Believe
I speak to the paper, as I speak to the first person I meet.Collection: Paper
I love a gay and sociable wisdom, and shun harshness and austerity in behaviour, holding every surly countenance suspect.Collection: Wisdom
Fear sometimes adds wings to the heels, and sometimes nails them to the ground, and fetters them from moving.Collection: Fear
One should be ever booted and spurred and ready to depart.Collection: Dying
Opinion is a powerful party, bold, and without measure.Collection: Powerful
A man must live in the world and make the best of it, such as it is.Collection: Acceptance
Who ever saw a doctor use the prescription of his colleague without cutting out or adding something?Collection: Cutting
I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden.Collection: Death
A little folly is desirable in him that will not be guilty of stupidity.Collection: Stupidity
Vice leaves repentance in the soul, like an ulcer in the flesh, which is always scratching and lacerating itself; for reason effaces all other griefs and sorrows, but it begets that of repentance.Collection: Grief
I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.Collection: Change
The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.Collection: Life
If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time; it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.Collection: Words Of Wisdom
I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.Collection: Law
It is commonly seene by experience, that excellent memories do rather accompany weake judgements.Collection: Memories
It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it.Collection: Government
Indeed, there is no such thing as an altogether ugly woman — or altogether beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself.Collection: Lying
Every man carries the entire form of human condition.Collection: Men
For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts.Collection: Privilege
Any time and any place can be used to study: his room, a garden, is table, his bed; when alone or in company; morning and evening. His chief study will be Philosophy, that Former of good judgement and character who is privileged to be concerned with everything.Collection: Morning
Teach him a certain refinement in sorting out and selecting his arguments, with an affection for relevance and so for brevity. Above all let him be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether the truth is born at his rival's doing or within himself from some change in his ideas.Collection: Educational
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.Collection: Animal
Amongst so many borrowed things, am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.Collection: Stealing
A learned man is not learned in all things; but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout, even to ignorance itself.Collection: Ignorance
There is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some nation or other.Collection: Extremes
He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.Collection: Men
I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.Collection: Education
We are neither obstinately nor wilfully to oppose evils, nor truckle under them for want of courage, but that we are naturally to give way to them, according to their condition and our own, we ought to grant free passage to diseases; and I find they stay less with me who let them alone. And I have lost those which are reputed the most tenacious and obstinate of their own defervescence, without any help or art, and contrary to their rules. Let us a little permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.Collection: Art
Our wisdom and deliberation for the most part follow the lead of chance.Collection: Wisdom
Intemperance is the plaque of sensuality, and temperance is not its bane but its seasoning.Collection: Sensuality
Adrian, the Emperor, exclaimed incessantly, when dying, "That the crowd of physicians had killed him."Collection: Medicine
The births of all things are weak and tender and therefore we should have our eyes intent on beginnings.Collection: New Beginnings
Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.Collection: Fashion
Pride dwells in the thought; the tongue can have but a very little share in it.Collection: Pride
We cannot be held to what is beyond our strength and means; for at times the accomplishment and execution may not be in our power, and indeed there is nothing really in our own power except the will: on this are necessarily based and founded all the principles that regulate the duty of man.Collection: Mean
We judge a horse not only by its pace on a racecourse, but also by its walk, nay, when resting in its stable.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: War
As for our pupils talk, let his virtue and his sense of right and wrong shine through it and have no guide but reason. Make him understand that confessing an error which he discovers in his own argument even when he alone has noticed it is an act of justice and integrity, which are the main qualities he pursues; stubbornness and rancour are vulgar qualities, visible in common souls whereas to think again, to change one's mind and to give up a bad case on the heat of the argument are rare qualities showing strength and wisdom.Collection: Giving Up
The most profound joy has more of gravity than of gaiety in it.Collection: Profound
The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, and with good reason; that passion alone, in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidentsCollection: Fear
Repentance is no other than a recanting of the will, and opposition to our fancies, which lead us which way they please.Collection: Fancy
In his commerce with men I mean him to include- and that principally- those who live only in the memory of books. By means of history he will frequent those great souls of former years. If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time; it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.Collection: Memories
For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness.Collection: Witty
We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning.Collection: Art
A person is bound to lose when he talks about himself; if he belittles himself, he is believed; if he praises himself, he isn't believed.Collection: Bragging