Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

No one suffers long, save by his own fault. If a man has no heart for either living or dying; if he has no will either to resist or to run away: what are we to do with him?

One may be humble out of pride.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

To understand the essence and workings of insanity, Gallus Vibius strained his mind so that he tore his judgment from its seat and could never get it back again: he could boast he became mad through wisdom.1

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 several pieces 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 my own governing method, ignorance.

how I would hate the reputation of being clever at writing but stupid and useless at everything else! I would rather be stupid at both than to choose to employ my good qualities as badly as that.

Philosophy believes she has not made a bad use of her resources when she has bestowed on Reason sovereign mastery over our soul and authority to bridle our appetites.

Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb.      —Seneca, Hippolytus, act ii. scene 3.] A

Happy are they who can please and delight their senses with things insensate—and who can live off their death.

You should study more to understand that you know little.

When a man is commonplace in discussion yet valued for what he writes that shows that his talents lie in his borrowed sources not in himself.

there is nothing in the whole world madder than bringing matters down to the measure of our own capacities and potentialities. How

The ancient Florentines were so far from seeking to obtain any advantage over their enemies by surprise, that they always gave them a month's warning before they drew their army into the field, by the continual tolling of a bell they called Martinella.—[After St. Martin.] For

It is fear that I am most afraid of.

Assaulted as I am by ambition, covetousness, rashness and superstition, and having such enemies to life as that within me, should I start wondering about the motions of the Universe?

The more simply we entrust ourself to Nature the more wisely we do so. Oh what a soft and delightful pillow, and what a sane one on which to rest a well-schooled head, are ignorance and unconcern.

If it lay in my power to make myself feared, I had rather make myself beloved.

The majority of our polities, as Aristotle says, are like the Cyclops, abandoning the guidance of the women and children to each individual man according to his mad and injudicious ideas: hardly any, except the polities of Sparta and of Crete, have entrusted the education of children to their laws.

With very little ado I stop the first sally of my emotions, and leave the subject that begins to be troublesome before it transports me. He who stops not the start will never be able to stop the course; he who cannot keep them out will never, get them out when they are once got in;

Fortune is glass: it glitters, then it shatters.]58

But we must not (as we do every day) give the name of duty to an inward bitter harshness born of self-interested passion, nor that of courage to malicious and treacherous dealings. What they call zeal is their propensity to wickedness and violence: it is not the cause which sets them ablaze but self-interest: they stoke up war not because it is just but because it is war.

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

If a man has no heart for either living or dying; if he has no will either to resist or to run away: what are we to do with him?

Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.