Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.”

— Michel de Montaigne

102. “Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.”

— Michel de Montaigne

103. “I walk firmer and more secure uphill than down.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

105. “Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.”

— Michel de Montaigne

106. “Happiness involves working toward meaningful goals.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

108. “If my intentions were not to be read in my eyes and voice, I should not have survived so long without quarrels and without harm, seeing the indiscreet freedom with which I say, right or wrong, whatever comes into my head.”

— Michel de Montaigne

109. “The thing I fear most is fear.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

111. “Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.”

— Michel de Montaigne

112. “To understand via the heart is not to understand.”

— Michel de Montaigne

113. “And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people’s flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.”

— Michel de Montaigne

114. “Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

116. “The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.”

— Michel de Montaigne

117. “The honor we receive from those that fear us, is not honor; those respects are paid to royalty and not to me.”

— Michel de Montaigne

118. “The most certain sign of wisdom is continual cheerfulness; her state is like the things above the moon, always clear and serene.”

— Michel de Montaigne

119. “Saying is one thing, doing another. We must consider the sermon and the preacher distinctly and apart.”

— Michel de Montaigne

120. “We are all of us richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow and to beg, and brought up more to make use of what is another’s than of our own.”

— Michel de Montaigne

121. “Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.”

— Michel de Montaigne

122. “The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

124. “Travelling through the world produces a marvellous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose.”

— Michel de Montaigne

125. “I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

126. “If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”

— Michel de Montaigne

127. “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn .”

— Michel de Montaigne

128. “Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.”

— Michel de Montaigne

129. “Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than prudent and just.”

— Michel de Montaigne

130. “If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.”

— Michel de Montaigne

131. “Whatever can be done another day can be done today.”

— Michel de Montaigne

132. “Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.”

— Michel de Montaigne

133. “The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.”

— Michel de Montaigne

134. “He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.”

— Michel de Montaigne

135. “Physicians have this advantage: the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures.”

— Michel de Montaigne

136. “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.”

— Michel de Montaigne

137. “Health is a precious thing, and the only one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out not only his time, sweat, labor and goods, but also life itself to obtain it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

138. “Women are not altogether in the wrong when they refuse the rules of life prescribed to the World, for men only have established them and without their consent.”

— Michel de Montaigne

139. “There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.”

— Michel de Montaigne

140. “It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.”

— Michel de Montaigne

141. “A strong imagination begetteth opportunity.”

— Michel de Montaigne

142. “There is no more expensive thing than a free gift.”

— Michel de Montaigne

143. “I want death to find me planting my cabbages.”

— Michel de Montaigne

144. “Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.”

— Michel de Montaigne

145. “If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

146. “The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, and with good reason; that passion alone, in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents.”

— Michel de Montaigne

147. “If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live.”

— Michel de Montaigne

148. “Obstinacy and dogmatism are the surest signs of stupidity. Is there anything more confident, resolute, disdainful, grave and serious than an ass?”

— Michel de Montaigne

149. “Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?”

— Michel de Montaigne

150. “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