Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right…. We sleeping wake, and waking sleep.

The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

A man may be humble through vainglory.

No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.

Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.

Few men have been admired by their own households.

It is not without good reason said, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.

There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

I quote others only to better express myself.

Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray… I am myself the matter of my book.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.

We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. Nay, and when I walk alone in a beautiful Orchard, if my Thoughts are some part of the Time taken up with strange Occurrences, I some part of the Time call them back again to my Walk, or to the Orchard, to the Sweetness of the Solitude, and to my self.

There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?

The easy, gentle, and sloping path… is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can.