Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.”

— Michel de Montaigne

452. “Petty vexations may at times be petty, but still they are vexations. The smallest and most inconsiderable annoyances are the most piercing. As small letters weary the eye most, so the smallest affairs disturb us most.”

— Michel de Montaigne

453. “Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.”

— Michel de Montaigne

454. “Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping themselves always in show, like the statue of a public place.”

— Michel de Montaigne

455. “This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.”

— Michel de Montaigne

456. “The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.”

— Michel de Montaigne

457. “We have so much ill fortune as inconstancy, or so much bad purpose as folly, we are not so full of evil as we are of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are base.”

— Michel de Montaigne

458. “The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.”

— Michel de Montaigne

459. “Glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place.”

— Michel de Montaigne

460. “When all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; his accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never.”

— Michel de Montaigne

461. “Decency, not to dare to do that in public which it is decent enough to do in private.”

— Michel de Montaigne

462. “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.”

— Michel de Montaigne

463. “And I loathe people who find it harder to put up with a gown askew than with a soul askew and who judge a man by his bow, his bearing and his boots.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

465. “Necessity is a violent school-mistress.”

— Michel de Montaigne

466. “God defend me from being an honest man according to the description which every day I see made by each man to his own glorification.”

— Michel de Montaigne

467. “Ceremony forbids us to express by words things that are lawful and natural, and we obey it; reason forbids us to do things unlawful and ill, and nobody obeys it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

468. “What fear has once made me will, I am bound still to will when without fear.”

— Michel de Montaigne

469. “I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”

— Michel de Montaigne

470. “A man must always study, but he must not always go to school: what a contemptible thing is an old abecedarian!”

— Michel de Montaigne

471. “To know how to live is my trade and my art.”

— Michel de Montaigne

472. “The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge.”

— Michel de Montaigne

473. “We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty; but an advantage in judgment we yield to none.”

— Michel de Montaigne

474. “There is no greater enemy to those who would please than expectation.”

— Michel de Montaigne

475. “The most useful and honorable science and occupation for a woman is the science of housekeeping. I know some that are miserly, very few that are good managers.”

— Michel de Montaigne

476. “Aesop, that great man, saw his master making water as he walked. “What!” he said, “Must we void ourselves as we run?” Use our timeas best we may, yet a great part of it will still be idly and ill spent.”

— Michel de Montaigne

477. “Amongst all other vices there is none I hate more than cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extremest of all vices.”

— Michel de Montaigne

478. “A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted.”

— Michel de Montaigne

479. “T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past.”

— Michel de Montaigne

480. “The first distinction among men, and the first consideration that gave one precedence over another, was doubtless the advantage of beauty.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

482. “We seek and offer ourselves to be gulled.”

— Michel de Montaigne

483. “Those things that are dearest to us have cost us the most.”

— Michel de Montaigne

484. “My business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk’s sake.”

— Michel de Montaigne

485. “Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.”

— Michel de Montaigne

486. “It is the part of cowardliness, and not of virtue, to seek to squat itself in some hollow lurking hole, or to hide herself under some massive tomb, thereby to shun the strokes of fortune.”

— Michel de Montaigne

487. “I had rather complain of ill-fortune than be ashamed of victory.”

— Michel de Montaigne

488. “Honesty is a question of right and wrong, not a matter of policy.”

— Michel de Montaigne

489. “No wonder, said an Ancient, that chance has so much power over us, since it is by chance that we live.”

— Michel de Montaigne

490. “As far as physicians go, chance is more valuable than knowledge.”

— Michel de Montaigne

491. “If I am to serve as an instrument of deceit, at least let it be with a clear conscience. I do not want to be considered either so affectionate or so loyal a servant as to be found fit to betray anyone.”

— Michel de Montaigne

492. “How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?”

— Michel de Montaigne

493. “The only good histories are those written by those who had command in the events they describe.”

— Michel de Montaigne

494. “There are no truths, only moments of claryty passing for answers.”

— Michel de Montaigne

495. “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.”

— Michel de Montaigne

496. “The religion of my doctor or my lawyer cannot matter. That consideration has nothing in common with the functions of the friendship they owe me.”

— Michel de Montaigne

497. “The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.”

— Michel de Montaigne

498. “As for extraordinary things, all the provision in the world would not suffice.”

— Michel de Montaigne

499. “There is nothing so noble and so right as to play our human life well and fitly, nor anything so difficult to learn as how to livethis life well and according to Nature.”

— Michel de Montaigne

500. “The most unhappy and frail creatures are men and yet they are the proudest.”

— Michel de Montaigne