Quotes From "The Complete Essays" By Michel De Montaigne

D'autant que nous avons cher, estre, et estre consiste en mouvement et action. Michel De Montaigne

J'accuse toute violence en l'education d'une ame tendre, qu'on dresse pour l'honneur, et la liberté. Michel De Montaigne

Il n'est rien qui tente mes larmes que les larmes. Michel De Montaigne

It is a disaster that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and always sends you away dissatisfied and fearful, whereas stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy and assurance. Michel De Montaigne

...were these Essays of mine considerable enough to deserve a critical judgment, it might then, I think, fallout that they would not much take with common and vulgar capacities, nor be very acceptable to the singular and excellent sort of men; the first would not understand them enough, and the last too much; and so they may hover in the middle region. Michel De Montaigne

Did I know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to the bottom, and to be deceived in my own inability; but sprinkling here one word and there another, patterns cut from severalpieces and scattered without design and without engaging myself too far, I am not responsible for them, or obliged to keep close to my subject, without varying at my own liberty and pleasure, and giving up myself to doubt and uncertainty, and to myown governing method, ignorance. Michel De Montaigne

Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set chatting together, said to them, “Either I am much deceived, or by your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no very deep discourse.” To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied: “ ’Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of the verb Ballo be spelt with adouble L, or that hunt after the derivation of the comparatives Cheirou and Beltiou, and the superlatives Cheiriotou and Beliotou, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science; but as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad. Michel De Montaigne

The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough. Michel De Montaigne

Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favor and esteem for his valor, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished, and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: “Yourself, sir, ” replied the other, “by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of my life. Michel De Montaigne

The natural heat, say the good-fellows, first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middleregion, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress. Michel De Montaigne

Is it that we pretend to a reformation? Truly, no: but it may be we are more addicted to Venus than our fathers were. They are two exercises that thwart and hinder one another in their vigor. Lechery weakens our stomach on the one side; and on the other sobriety renders us more spruce and amorous for the exercise of love. Michel De Montaigne

He lives happy and master of himself who can say as each day passes on, "I have lived. Michel De Montaigne

Meditation is a powerful and full study as can effectually taste and employ themselves. Michel De Montaigne

I have heard Silvius, an excellent physician of Paris, say that lest the digestive faculties of the stomach should grow idle, it were not amiss once a month to rouse them by this excess, and to spur them lest they should grow dull and rusty; and one author tells us that the Persians used to consult about their mostimportant affairs after being well warmed with wine. Michel De Montaigne

Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.( There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.) Michel De Montaigne

Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing. Michel De Montaigne

I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind. Michel De Montaigne

All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own. Michel De Montaigne

We are all lumps, and of so various and inform a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others. Michel De Montaigne

Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition. Michel De Montaigne

To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom. Michel De Montaigne

On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom. Michel De Montaigne

Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their youth..fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober. Michel De Montaigne

I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness. Michel De Montaigne

What a prodigious conscience must that be that can be at quiet within itself whilst it harbors under thesame roof, with so agreeing and so calm a society, both the crime and the judge? Michel De Montaigne

This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at nineteen, and yet would have a man to be thirty before he could be fit to determine a dispute about a gutter. Michel De Montaigne

If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways. Michel De Montaigne