Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

One may be humble out of pride.

Friendship is the highest degree of perfection in society.

To die is not to play a part in society; it is the act of a single person. Let us live and laugh among our friends; let us die and sulk among strangers.

We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.

The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.

When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?

Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.

I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.

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

Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own.

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.

If others surpass you in knowledge, in charm, in strength, in fortune, you have other causes to blame for it; but if you yield tothem in stoutness of heart you have only yourself to blame.

Examples teach us that in military affairs, and all others of a like nature, study is apt to enervate and relax the courage of man, rather than to give strength and energy to the mind.

I don't break the law* made for crooks, when I take away my own property - thus I am not obliged to conform to the law made for murderers when I deprive myself of my own life.

All the fame you should look for in life is to have lived it quietly.

Even opinion is of force enough to make itself to be espoused at the expense of life.

Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all.... All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.

Every period of life has its peculiar prejudices; whoever saw old age, that did not applaud the past, and condemn the present times?

Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have done. I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future.

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

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

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

I have gathered a posy of other menÂ's flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own.

In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.