Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

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

There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.

The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

The wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can.

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.

As far as fidelity is concerned, there is no animal in the world as treacherous as man.

If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.

My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.

Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.

Few men are admired by their servants.

Unless a man feels he has a good enough memory, he should never venture to lie.

The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.

I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.

A man must live in the world and make the best of it, such as it is.

No man profiteth but by the loss of others.

A learned man is not learned in all things; but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout, even to ignorance itself.

No man is a hero to his own valet.

A man must always study, but he must not always go to school: what a contemptible thing is an old abecedarian!

The man who thinks he knows does not yet know what knowing is

A man must learn to endure patiently what he cannot avoid conveniently.

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.

In my opinion, every rich man is a miser.

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.