Michel de Montaigne
The height and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and pleasure of its exercise; so far from difficulty, that boys, as well as men, and the innocent as well as the subtle, may make it their own; and it is by order and good conduct, and not by force, that it is to be acquired.Collection: Exercise
The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion-the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt-both with the common motion and with their own.Collection: Rocks
Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.Collection: Ambition
To behave rightly, we ourselves should never lay a hand on our servants as long as our anger lasts. Things will seem different to us when we have quieted and cooled down.Collection: Anger
I do not portray the thing in itself. I portray the passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people put it, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute.Collection: Years
The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.Collection: Life
There are as many and innumerable degrees of wit, as there are cubits between this and heaven.Collection: Heaven
Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world? I cannot keep a record of my life by my actions; fortune places them too low. I keep it by my thoughts.Collection: Taken
When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing.Collection: Sight
Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have done. I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future.Collection: Life
Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, ... hit on a body and face so ugly and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty.Collection: Perfect
In love, 'tis no other than frantic desire for that which flies from us.Collection: Love
The judgment is an utensil proper for all subjects, and will have an oar in everything.Collection: Utensils
All the fame you should look for in life is to have lived it quietly.Collection: Looks
Why do people respect the package rather than the man?Collection: Men
Let every foot have its own shoe.Collection: Shoes
The pleasure we hold in esteem for the course of our lives ought to have a greater share of our time dedicated to it; we should refuse no occasion nor omit any opportunity of drinking, and always have it in our minds.Collection: Drinking
A volunteer, you assign yourself specific roles and risks according to your judgement of their brilliance and importance, and you see when life itself may be justifiably devoted to them.Collection: Volunteer
Is it reasonable that even the arts should take advantage of and profit by our natural stupidity and feebleness of mind?Collection: Art
The first distinction among men, and the first consideration that gave one precedence over another, was doubtless the advantage of beauty.Collection: Beauty
Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.Collection: Stupid
If to take up books were to take them in, and if to see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say I am.Collection: Running
To say less of yourself than is true is stupidity, not modesty. To pay yourself less than you are worth is cowardice and pusillanimity.Collection: Self
The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.Collection: Memories
Virtue cannot be followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.Collection: Purpose
Only he can judge of matters great and high whose soul is likewise.Collection: Judging
Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like silkworms, and is suffocated in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel...thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered.Collection: Running
He was doubtless an understanding Fellow that said, there was no happy Marriage but betwixt a blind Wife and a deaf Husband.Collection: Husband
Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.Collection: Mean
We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater to possess itCollection: Born
The recognition of virtue is not less valuable from the lips of the man who hates it, since truth forces him to acknowledge it; and though he may be unwilling to take it into his inmost soul, he at least decks himself out in its trappings.Collection: Hate
I would rather produce my passions than brood over them at my expense; they grow languid when they have vent and expression. It is better that their point should operate outwardly than be turned against us.Collection: Passion
We have so much ill fortune as inconstancy, or so much bad purpose as folly, we are not so full of evil as we are of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are baseCollection: Evil
God is favorable to those whom he makes to die by degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age. The last death will be so much the less painful: it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most.Collection: Death
Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.Collection: Long
I do not know whether I would not like much better to have produced one perfectly formed child by intercourse with the muses than by intercourse with my wife.Collection: Children
Thus we should beware of clinging to vulgar opinions, and judge things by reason's way, not by popular say.Collection: Judging
How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?Collection: Anger
Not because Socrates said so,... I look upon all men as my compatriots.Collection: Men
There is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy.Collection: Happiness
It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children.Collection: Children
There is nothing in which a horse's power is better revealed than in a neat, clean stop.Collection: Horse
God sends the cold according to the coat.Collection: God
The soul that has no established aim loses itselfCollection: Soul
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.Collection: Believe
No man dies before his hour. The time you leave behind was no more yours, than that which was before your birth, and concerneth you no more.Collection: Death
I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Heart
We may so seize on virtue, that if we embrace it with an overgreedy and violent desire, it may become vicious.Collection: Desire