Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “Take care that old age does not wrinkle your spirit even more than your face.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

53. “A liar would be brave toward God, while he is a coward toward men; for a lie faces God, and shrinks from man.”

— Michel de Montaigne

54. “Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart. If I were pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that my only reply could be: Because it was he, because it was I.”

— Michel de Montaigne

55. “The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts, and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.”

— Michel de Montaigne

56. “I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other.”

— Michel de Montaigne

57. “It is in vain that we get upon stilts, for once on them, it is still with our legs that we must walk. And on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own ass.”

— Michel de Montaigne

58. “It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.”

— Michel de Montaigne

59. “Men are nothing until they are excited.”

— Michel de Montaigne

60. “To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death.”

— Michel de Montaigne

61. “Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.”

— Michel de Montaigne

62. “Only the fools are certain and assured.”

— Michel de Montaigne

63. “I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.”

— Michel de Montaigne

64. “Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.”

— Michel de Montaigne

65. “Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.”

— Michel de Montaigne

66. “No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.”

— Michel de Montaigne

67. “To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

68. “It’s not victory if it doesn’t end the war.”

— Michel de Montaigne

69. “Greatness of soul consists not so much in soaring high and in pressing forward, as in knowing how to adapt and limit oneself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

70. “It is fear that I stand most in fear of, in sharpness it exceeds every other feeling.”

— Michel de Montaigne

71. “Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

72. “It is easier to sacrifice great than little things.”

— Michel de Montaigne

73. “All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.”

— Michel de Montaigne

74. “True freedom is to have power over oneself for everything.”

— Michel de Montaigne

75. “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.”

— Michel de Montaigne

76. “Silence and modesty are very valuable qualities in conversation.”

— Michel de Montaigne

77. “Saying is one thing and doing is another.”

— Michel de Montaigne

78. “Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener. The latter must prepare to receive it according to the motion it takes.”

— Michel de Montaigne

79. “There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees which are falsehoods on the other.”

— Michel de Montaigne

80. “The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.”

— Michel de Montaigne

81. “A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.”

— Michel de Montaigne

82. “Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.”

— Michel de Montaigne

83. “There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.”

— Michel de Montaigne

84. “My appetite comes to me while eating.”

— Michel de Montaigne

85. “No man is a hero to his own valet.”

— Michel de Montaigne

86. “Since I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.”

— Michel de Montaigne

87. “The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.”

— Michel de Montaigne

88. “In my opinion, every rich man is a miser.”

— Michel de Montaigne

89. “He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.”

— Michel de Montaigne

90. “Happiness involves working toward meaningful goals.”

— Michel de Montaigne

91. “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.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

93. “The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.”

— Michel de Montaigne

94. “There is no wish more natural than the wish to know.”

— Michel de Montaigne

95. “Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art.”

— Michel de Montaigne

96. “I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.”

— Michel de Montaigne

97. “Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and if they will not adapt to me, I adapt to them.”

— Michel de Montaigne

98. “Tis so much to be a king, that he only is so by being so.”

— Michel de Montaigne

99. “Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!”

— Michel de Montaigne

100. “Writing does not cause misery. It is born of misery.”

— Michel de Montaigne