Michel de Montaigne
We have the pleasures suitable to our lot; let us not usurp those of greatness. Ours are more natural and all the more solid and sure for being humbler. Since we will not do so out of conscience, at least out of ambition let us reject ambition.Collection: Ambition
Fie on the eloquence that leaves us craving itself, not things!Collection: Wisdom
I was not long since in a company where I was not who of my fraternity brought news of a kind of pills, by true account, composed of a hundred and odd several ingredients; whereat we laughed very heartily, and made ourselves good sport; for what rock so hard were able to resist the shock or withstand the force of so thick and numerous a battery?Collection: Sports
Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.Collection: Men
The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried.Collection: Evil
You have your face bare; I am all face.Collection: Faces
The secret counsels of princes are a troublesome burden to such as have only to execute them.Collection: Advice
But the touch or company of any man whatsoever stirreth up their heat, which in their solitude was hushed and quiet, and lay as cinders raked up in ashes.Collection: Men
It is for little souls, that truckle under the weight of affairs, not to know how clearly to disengage themselves, and not to know how to lay them aside and take them up again.Collection: Soul
Report followeth not all goodness, except difficulty and rarity be joined thereto.Collection: Goodness
In general I ask for books that make use of learning, not those that build it up.Collection: Book
True it is that she who escapeth safe and unpolluted from out the school of freedom, giveth more confidence of herself than she who comet sound out of the school of severity and restraint.Collection: Freedom
Who so hath his mind on taking, hath it no more on what he taketh.Collection: Mind
In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.Collection: Teacher
Books are pleasant, but if by being over-studious we impair our health and spoil our good humour, two of the best things we have, let us give it over. I, for my part, am one of those who think no fruit derived from them can recompense so great a loss.Collection: Book
There is nothing so noble and so right as to play our human life well and fitly, nor anything so difficult to learn as how to livethis life well and according to Nature.Collection: Play
The archer who overshoots his mark does no better than he who falls short of it.Collection: Fall
Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.Collection: Men
Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly.Collection: Happiness
Anyone who does not feel sufficiently strong in memory should not meddle with lying.Collection: Strength
It needs courage to be afraid.Collection: Confidence
I have gathered a posy of other mens flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own.Collection: Inspirational
No wind favors he who has no destined port.Collection: Inspirational
We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things, and one part is no less necessary than the other.Collection: Suffering
Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.Collection: Book
It is indeed the boundary of life, beyond which we are not to pass; which the law of nature has pitched for a limit not to be exceeded.Collection: Law
Everything must not always be said, for that would be folly.Collection: Would Be
Everyone calls barbarity what he is not accustomed to.Collection: Accustomed
There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline.Collection: Order
But sure there is need of other remedies than dreaming, a weak contention of art against nature.Collection: Dream
Habit is second nature.Collection: Nature
The desire for riches is more sharpened by their use than by their need. Pleasing all: a mark that can never be aimed at or hit.Collection: Desire
Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest.Collection: Life
Whatever is preached to us, and whatever we learn, we should still remember that it is man that gives, and man that receives; it is a mortal hand that presents it to us, it is a mortal hand that accepts it.Collection: Men
Princes give mee sufficiently, if they take nothing from me, and doe me much good, if they doe me no hurt: it is all I require of them.Collection: Hurt
Tis so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so.Collection: Kings
Those sciences which govern the morals of mankind, such as Theology and Philosophy, make everything their concern: no activity is so private or so secret as to escape their attention or their jurisdiction.Collection: Philosophy
I walk firmer and more secure uphill than down.Collection: Challenges
It is equally pointless to weep because we won't be alive a hundred years from now as that we were not here a hundred years ago.Collection: Death
It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.Collection: Children
Few men are admired by their servants.Collection: Men
Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other.Collection: Power
The sage says that all that is under heaven incurs the same law and the same fate.Collection: Fate
What kind of truth is it which has these mountains as its boundary and is a lie beyond them?Collection: Lying
Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.Collection: Criticism
T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past.Collection: Past
I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.Collection: Men
Necessity is a violent school-mistress.Collection: School
Nature has with a Motherly Tenderness observed this, that the Action she has enjoyned us for our Necessity should be also pleasant to us, and invites us to them, not only by Reason, but also by Appetite: and tis Injustice to infringe her Laws.Collection: Nature