Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

It takes so much to be a king that he exists only as such. That extraneous glare that surrounds him hides him and conceals him from us; our sight breaks and is dissipated by it, being filled and arrested by this strong light.

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own Affairs than we.

Meditation is a rich and powerful method of study for anyone who knows how to examine his mind.

The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.

If you don't know how to die, don't worry Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you don't bother your head about it.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

It [marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

Nature has with a Motherly Tenderness observed this, that the Action she has enjoyned us for our Necessity should be also pleasant to us, and invites us to them, not only by Reason, but also by Appetite: and 'tis Injustice to infringe her Laws.

For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.

Don't discuss yourself, for you are bound to lose if you belittle yourself, you are believed if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice...for we have no other criterion of reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.

Even on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our ass.

He who has not a good memory should never take upon himself the trade of lying.

He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

Malice sucks up the greater part of her own venom, and poisons herself.

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, yet he makes gods by the dozens.

Once you have decided to keep a certain pile, it is no longer yours; for you can't spend it.

Since we cannot match it let us take our revenge by abusing it.

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. ..And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation.

The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure.

The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.

Virtue craves a steep and thorny path.