Quotes By Michel De Montaigne

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

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

The beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things.

No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.

The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.

Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

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.

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

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

Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

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

If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

The thing I fear most is fear.

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.