Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

The concern that some women show at the absence of their husbands, does not arise from their not seeing them and being with them, but from their apprehension that their husbands are enjoying pleasures in which they do not participate, and which, from their being at a distance, they have not the power of interrupting.

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: "I settle nothing…. I do not understand it…. Nothing seems true that may not seem false." Their sacramental word is E?___, which is to say, I suspend my judgment.

Everyone recognizes me in my book, and my book in me.

As by some might be saide of me: that here I have but gathered a nosegay of strange floures, and have put nothing of mine unto it, but the thred to binde them. Certes, I have given unto publike opinion, that these borrowed ornaments accompany me; but I meane not they should cover or hide me...

There are defeats more triumphant than victories.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

Marriage is like a cage one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

This notion [skepticism] is more clearly understood by asking "What do I know?"

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

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

Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition—and perchance to some excess—I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.

It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength.

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

Our wisdom and deliberation for the most part follow the lead of chance.

And as hearbes and trees are bettered and fortified by being transplanted, so formes of speach are embellished and graced by variation.... As in our ordinary language, we shall sometimes meete with excellent phrases, and quaint metaphors, whose blithnesse fadeth through age, and colour is tarnish by to common using them....

My trade and art is to live.

A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he and I was I.

My trade and my art is living.

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.

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