Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

One open way of speaking introduces another open way of speaking, and draws out discoveries, like wine and love.

In love, 'tis no other than frantic desire for that which flies from us.

Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, ... hit on a body and face so ugly and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty.

If love and ambition should be in equal balance, and come to jostle with equal force, I make no doubt but that the last would win the prize.

This very Rome that we behold deserves our love ...: the only common and universal city.

Nothing else but an insatiate thirst of enjoying a greedily desired object.

How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.

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

Every man has within himself the entire human condition

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.

I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.

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

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.

If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be explained by replying: 'Because it was he; because it was me.

Every movement reveals us.

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself

Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

No wind favors he who has no destined port.

Kings and philosophers shit—and so do ladies.

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

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

Other people do not see you at all, but guess at you by uncertain conjectures.

I want us to be doing things, prolonging life's duties as much as we can. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.