Quotes By Michel De Montaigne

Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of soul, impossible.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

How many condemnations I have witnessed more criminal than the crime!

The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness.

Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

One may be humble out of pride.

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge.

If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.

It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.

If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed but by answering: Because it was he, because it was myself.

There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.

The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.

The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.

It is an absolute and virtually divine perfection to know how to enjoy our being rightfully.

In nine lifetimes, you'll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.

Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think.

A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.

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.

'Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

My trade and art is to live.

I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.

Few men have been admired of their familiars.

I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man's estate.