Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

I never met a man who thought his thinking was faulty.

Men ... are not agreed about any one thing, not even that heaven is over our heads.

We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?

Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from whathe is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.

God defend me from being an honest man according to the description which every day I see made by each man to his own glorification

After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to the spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they proceeded to those of the slaughter of men, to the gladiators.

For there is no air that men so greedily draw in, that diffuses itself so soon, and that penetrates so deep as that of license.

No man divulges his revenue, or at least which way it comes in: but every one publishes his acquisitions.

There is nothing which so poisons princes as flattery, nor anything whereby wicked men more easily obtain credit and favor with them.

Some men seem remarkable to the world in whom neither their wives nor their valets saw anything extraordinary. Few men have been admired by their servants.

Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency: a man may very well say a good thing, give a good answer, cite a good sentence, without at all seeing the force of either the one or the other.

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

Taking it all in all, I find it is more trouble to watch after money than to get it.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

Scratching is one of nature's sweetest gratifications, and nearest at hand.

He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met to be the sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.

There is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself

But sure there is need of other remedies than dreaming, a weak contention of art against nature.

Habit is a second nature.

Amongst all other vices there is none I hate more than cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extremest of all vices.

Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?

Of the opinions of philosophy I most gladly embrace those that are most solid, that is to say, most human and most our own; my opinions, in conformity with my conduct, are low and humble.

Philosophy is doubt.