Michel de Montaigne
Socrates ... brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she was wasting her time, and restored her to man.... It is impossible to go back further and lower. He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do by itself.Collection: Men
Obstinacy and heat in argument are surest proofs of folly. Is there anything so stubborn, obstinate, disdainful, contemplative, grave, or serious, as an ass?Collection: Stubborn
Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than prudent and just.Collection: Sweet
What a wonderful thing it is that drop of seed, from which we are produced, bears in itself the impressions, not only of the bodily shape, but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers!Collection: Children
It is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them.Collection: Men
The profit we possess after study is to have become better and wiser.Collection: Educational
We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade.Collection: Suffering
A man has need of tough ears to hear himself fairly judged.Collection: Men
A man should not so much respect what he eats, as with whom he eats.Collection: Food
The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life.Collection: Birth
A man should ever, as much as in him lieth, be ready booted to take his journey, and above all things look he have then nothing to do but with himself.Collection: Travel
Things are not bad in themselves, but our cowardice makes them so.Collection: Cowardice
Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.Collection: Memories
We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.Collection: Men
After a tongue has once got the knack of lying, it is not to be imagined how impossible almost it is to reclaim it. Whence it comes to pass, that we see some men, who are otherwise very honest, so subject to this vice.Collection: Lying
I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's.Collection: Book
Gentleness and repose are paramount to everything else in woman.Collection: Paramount
It is the rule of rules, and the general law of all laws, that every person should observe those of the place where he is.Collection: Fashion
To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death.Collection: Death
It is not a mind, it is not a body that we educate, but it is a man, and we must not make two parts of him.Collection: Men
All general judgments are loose and imperfectCollection: Judgement
Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own.Collection: Horse
The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.Collection: Happiness
The most certain sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.Collection: Wisdom
Time steals away without any inconvenience.Collection: Time
Whether the events in our life are good or bad, greatly depends on the way we perceive them.Collection: Attitude
It needs good management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or less attention that we give to it...The shorter my possession of life the deeper and fuller I must make it.Collection: Happiness
Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.Collection: Fantasy
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learnt to die has forgot to serve.Collection: Death
It is the part of cowardliness, and not of virtue, to seek to squat itself in some hollow lurking hole, or to hide herself under some massive tomb, thereby to shun the strokes of fortune.Collection: Suicide
We are more solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak.Collection: Men
We find ourselves more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile simplicities of our children, than we do, afterward, with their most complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men.Collection: Sports
Can anything be imagined so ridiculous that this miserable and wretched creature, 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?Collection: World
Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on credit.Collection: Trust
If people must be talking about me, I would have it to be truthfully and justly. I would willingly return from the next world to contradict any person who described me other than I was, although he did it to honour me.Collection: Truth
I do not correct my first imaginings by my second--well, yes, perhaps a word or so, but only to vary, not to delete. I want to represent the course of my humors and I want people to see each part at its birth.Collection: People
It is not without good reason, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.Collection: Honesty
The share we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is, has not been acquired by our own powers. God has taught ushis wonderful secrets; our faith is not of our acquiring, it is purely the gift of another's bounty.Collection: God
Oh, a friend! How true is that old saying, that the enjoyment of one is sweeter and more necessary than that of the elements of water and fire!Collection: Love
Our skin is provided as adequately as theirs with endurance against the assaults of the weather: witness so many nations who have not yet tried the use of any clothes. Our ancient Gauls wore hardly any clothes; nor do the Irish, our neighbors, under so cold a sky.Collection: Sky
The world is but a school of inquisition; it is not who shall enter the ring, but who shall run the best courses.Collection: Running
Their pupils and their little charges are not nourished and fed by what they learn: the learning is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements, but having no other use or currency. 'Apud alios loqui didicerunt, non ipsi secum' [They have learned how to talk with others, not with themselves]Collection: Educational
Nor is it enough to toughen up his soul; you must also toughen up his muscles.Collection: Educational
One man may have some special knowledge at first-hand about the character of a river or a spring, who otherwise knows only what everyone else knows. Yet to give currency to this shred of information, he will undertake to write on the whole science of physics. From this fault many great troubles spring.Collection: Spring
Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of; just as we call "money" not only that which is legal, but also any counterfeit that will pass.Collection: Truth
The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure; neither the greatest captains nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the use or science of eating well.Collection: Art
For among other things he had been counseled to bring me to love knowledge and duty by my own choice, without forcing my will, and to educate my soul entirely through gentleness and freedom.Collection: Educational
The beginnings of all things are weak and tender. We must therefore be clear-sighted in the beginnings, for, as in their budding we discern not the danger, so in their full growth we perceive not the remedy.Collection: Growth
Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.Collection: Educational