Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

Handling and use by able minds give value to a language, not so much by innovating as by filling it out with more vigorous and varied services, by stretching and bending it.

Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him. -from By diverse means we arrive at the same end

If I had even the slightest grasp upon my own faculties, I would not make essays, I would make decisions.

There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgement as doth anger

Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.

I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it.

Whether we are running our home or studying or hunting or following any other sport, we should go to the very boundaries of pleasure but take good care not to be involved beyond the point where it begins to be mingled with pain.

Mon métier et mon art c'est vivre. [My craft and my skill is living.]

The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity.

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

Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together.

In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, such as the philosopher Herillus, who find in it the sovereign good and think it has the power to make us wise and happy.

I know nothing about education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.

I am not so shocked by savages who roast and eat the bodies of their dead as by those who torture and persecute the living.

For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me.

I care not so much what I am in the opinion of others, as what I am in my own.

Our understanding is conducted solely by means of the word: anyone who falsifies it betrays public society. It is the only tool by which we communicate our wishes and our thoughts; it is our soul's interpreter: if we lack that, we can no longer hold together; we can no longer know each other. When words deceive us, it breaks all intercourse and loosens the bonds of our polity.

No one is exempt from speaking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly.

Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.

To censure my own faults in some other person seems to me no more incongruous than to censure, as I often do, another's in myself. They must be denounced everywhere, and be allowed no place of sanctuary.

I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will, carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge and lose itself in mine.

No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it solemnly

Que sçay-je? (What do I know?)