Quotes About Montaigne

We ought to love temperance for itself, and in obedience to God who has commanded it and chastity; but what I am forced to by catarrhs, or owe to the stone, is neither chastity nor temperance.

Montaigne is the sworn enemy of all responsibility. He strives to dodge decisions. Solitary sage in a time of mass fanaticism, he seeks seclusion and flight.

Death is a certain refuge, never to be feared"; "Strong diseases require strong remedies", writes Montaigne

Montaigne's greatest pleasure is in the search, not the discovery.

Montaignes ware plezier is het zoeken, niet het vinden. Hij is niet een van die filosofen die op zoek zijn naar de steen der wijzen, naar een nuttige formule. Hij wil dogma noch leer en is permanent op zijn hoede voor starre beweringen: 'Niets boud beweren, niets lichtvaardig ontkennen.

For among other things he had been counseled to bring me to love knowledge and duty by my own choice, without forcing my will, and to educate my soul entirely through gentleness and freedom.

This very Rome that we behold deserves our love ...: the only common and universal city.

The manner in which Epictetus , Montaigne , and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.

That is why Bias jested with those who were going through the perils of a great storm with him and calling on the gods for help: Shut up, he said, so that they do not realize that you are here with me.

that it was an advantage to him to be interrupted in speaking, and that his adversaries were afraid to nettle him, lest his anger should redouble his eloquence.

what privilege this filthy excrement had, that we must carry about us a fine handkerchief to receive it, and, which was more, afterward to lap it carefully up and carry it all day about in our pockets, which, he said, could not but be much more nauseous and offensive, than to see it thrown away, as we did all other evacuations" – A gentleman

Vainglory and curiosity are the twin scourges of our souls. The former makes us stick our noses into everything: the latter forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.

of countering it if that had been the only factor, since all non-rational inborn tendencies are a kind of disease which ought to be fought against.

Nature a, (ce crains-je) elle mesme attaché à l'homme quelque instinct à l'inhumanité

Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.

have mixed a little bitterness with it, to the end, that seeing of what convenience it is, you might not too greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace

Folly is a bad quality; but not to be able to endure it, to fret and vex at it, as I do, is another sort of disease little less troublesome than folly itself; and is the thing that I will now accuse in myself.

Kjærligheten er en lidenskap som blander et ganske lite kvantum solid substans sammen med et langt større kvantum forfengelighet og feberfantasier.

Monsieur de Montaigne sent Monsieur Mattecoulon (For notice of Mattecoulon and D'Estissac, see Introduction.)  with his squire by post to pay a visit to the count

We cannot be held to promises beyond our power or our means. That is why - since nothing is really in our power but our will - it is on the will that all the rules and duties of Man are based and established.

If any one should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I feel it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer, 'Because it was he; because it was I.' There is, beyond what I am able to say, I know not what inexplicable and inevitable power that brought on this union.

Les femmes ont raison de se rebeller contre les lois parce que nous les avons faites sans elles », c'est un homme qui avait écrit ça, il s'appelait Montaigne. Ce

Before he was seventeen, Flaubert was reading Victor Hugo, Byron, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Montaigne, and early acquired the conviction that there was no such thing as indecency in true literature. For a while, the literature of the schoolmasters seemed to him not to be literature at all.

Montaigne blessed the form when he said, "If I knew my own mind, I would not make essays. I would make decisions.