Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

It is an absolute and virtually divine perfection to know how to enjoy our being rightfully.

Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.

The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.

We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater to possess it

If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.

We may so seize on virtue, that if we embrace it with an overgreedy and violent desire, it may become vicious.

There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge.

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum.

Our speech has its weaknesses and its defects, like all the rest. Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.

Experience stands on its own dunghill in medicine, and reason yields it place. Medicine has always professed experience to be the touchstone of its operations.

It is commonly seene by experience, that excellent memories do rather accompany weake judgements.

We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty; but an advantage in judgment we yield to none.

Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.

Tis faith alone that vividly and certainly comprehends the deep mysteries of our religion.

Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom.

Repentance is but a denying of our will, and an opposition of our fantasies.

The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, and with good reason; that passion alone, in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents

It is fear that I stand most in fear of, in sharpness it exceeds every other feeling.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself

The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.

I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other

Friendship is a creature formed for a companionship not for a herd.

The religion of my doctor or my lawyer cannot matter. That consideration has nothing in common with the functions of the friendship they owe me.

I listen with attention to the judgement of all men; but so far as I can remember, I have followed none but my own