Quotes By Michel De Montaigne

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.

For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.

Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.

The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.

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!

Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.

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

How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

One may be humble out of pride.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

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

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

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.

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

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

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.