Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

No man dies before his hour. The time you leave behind was no more yours, than that which was before your birth, and concerneth you no more.

If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time; it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.

The strength of any plan depends on the time. Circumstances and things eternally shift and change.

The vulgar and common esteem is seldom happy in hitting right; and I am much mistaken if, amongst the writings of my time, the worst are not those which have most gained the popular applause.

Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he, and I was I.

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.

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

If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.

Oh, a friend! How true is that old saying, that the enjoyment of one is sweeter and more necessary than that of the elements of water and fire!

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.

And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.

Necessity reconciles and brings men together; and this accidental connection afterward forms itself into laws.

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that tied them together.

A man should ever, as much as in him lieth, be ready booted to take his journey, and above all things look he have then nothing to do but with himself.

There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants.

The knowledge of courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study. It is like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first sight.

It has never occurred to me to wish for empire or royalty, nor for the eminence of those high and commanding fortunes. My aim lies not in that direction; I love myself too well.

We ought to love temperance for itself, and in obedience to God who has commanded it and chastity; but what I am forced to by catarrhs, or owe to the stone, is neither chastity nor temperance.

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

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts.