Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

Marriage can be compared to a cage: birds outside it despair to enter, and birds within, to escape.

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

A man must become wise at his own expense.

Only the fools are certain and assured.

Philosophical discussions habitually make men happy and joyful not frowning and sad.

He who fears he will suffer, already suffers from his fear.

Wisdom is a solid and entire building, of which every piece keeps its place and bears its mark.

Fie on the eloquence that leaves us craving itself, not things!

There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.

Children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.

A wise man loses nothing, if he but save himself.

Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.

We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us.

He was doubtless an understanding Fellow that said, there was no happy Marriage but betwixt a blind Wife and a deaf Husband.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

The daughter-in-law of Pythagoras said that a woman who goes to bed with a man ought to lay aside her modesty with her skirt, and put it on again with her petticoat

Every man has within himself the entire human condition

When all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; his accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never.

Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.

We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

Wise men have more to learn of fools than fools of wise men.