Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and apply myself to them, if they will not apply themselves to me.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

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

Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.

How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together.

Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.

A wise man never loses anything if he have himself.

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.

Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.

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

Since I would rather make of him [the child] an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide [tutor] with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.

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

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.

It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold…. The same reason that makes us bicker with a neighbor creates a war between princes.

Some defeats [are] more triumphant than victories.

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.