Quotes from Michel de Montaigne

Whether the events in our life are good or bad, greatly depends on the way we perceive them.

He loves little who loves by rule.

It is a rare life that remains orderly even in private.

The great and glorious masterpiece of humanity is to know how to live with a purpose.

Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.

No pleasure has any savor for me without communication.

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

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.

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and taciturn demeanor procured the credit of prudence and capacity!

If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.

There is nothing of evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.

Make use of life while you have it. Whether you have lived enough depends upon yourself, not on the number of your years.

Is it not enough to make me come back to life out of spite, to have someone who spat in my face while I existed come and rub my feet when I am beginning to exist no longer?

The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life.

There is no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.

My art and profession is to live.

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things, and one part is no less necessary than the other.

If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said.