Michel de Montaigne Quotes (145 Quotes)

I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

To know how to live is all my calling and all my art.

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

The land of marriage has this peculiarity that strangers are desirous of inhabiting it, while its natural inhabitants would willingly be banished from it.

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

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

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.

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.

A wise man loses nothing, if he but saves himself.

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.

The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.

My trade and art is to live.

The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

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

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.

Of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest.

There is no man so good who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the law, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.

I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.

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

I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.

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

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

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