Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.”

— Michel de Montaigne

152. “Laws are often made by fools, and even more often by men who fail in equity because they hate equality: but always by men, vain authorities who can resolve nothing.”

— Michel de Montaigne

153. “I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that tied them together.”

— Michel de Montaigne

154. “Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one’s own goodness.”

— Michel de Montaigne

155. “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.”

— Michel de Montaigne

156. “The births of all things are weak and tender and therefore we should have our eyes intent on beginnings.”

— Michel de Montaigne

157. “Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together.”

— Michel de Montaigne

158. “Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of soul, impossible.”

— Michel de Montaigne

159. “There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.”

— Michel de Montaigne

160. “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.”

— Michel de Montaigne

161. “The general order of things that takes care of fleas and moles also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

162. “I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

163. “Nor is it enough to toughen up his soul; you must also toughen up his muscles.”

— Michel de Montaigne

164. “I do not teach. I relate.”

— Michel de Montaigne

165. “I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.”

— Michel de Montaigne

166. “I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

167. “I love a friendship that flatters itself in the sharpness and vigor of its communications.”

— Michel de Montaigne

168. “If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they “artialize” nature.”

— Michel de Montaigne

169. “The wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can.”

— Michel de Montaigne

170. “The corruption of the age is made up by the particular contribution of every individual man; some contribute treachery, others injustice, atheism, tyranny, avarice, cruelty, according to their power.”

— Michel de Montaigne

171. “The body enjoys a great share in our being, and has an eminent place in it. Its structure and composition, therefore, are worthy of proper consideration.”

— Michel de Montaigne

172. “Plenty and indigence depend upon the opinion every one has of them; and riches, like glory of health, have no more beauty or pleasure than their possessor is pleaded to lend them.”

— Michel de Montaigne

173. “God is favorable to those whom he makes to die by degrees; ’tis the only benefit of old age. The last death will be so much the less painful: it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most.”

— Michel de Montaigne

174. “Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them.”

— Michel de Montaigne

175. “The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.”

— Michel de Montaigne

176. “In nine lifetimes, you’ll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.”

— Michel de Montaigne

177. “Every day I hear stupid people say things that are not stupid.”

— Michel de Montaigne

178. “How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.”

— Michel de Montaigne

179. “I love a gay and sociable wisdom, and shun harshness and austerity in behaviour, holding every surly countenance suspect.”

— Michel de Montaigne

180. “Lovers are angry, reconciled, entreat, thank, appoint, and finally speak all things, by their.”

— Michel de Montaigne

181. “It is not a mind, it is not a body that we educate, but it is a man, and we must not make two parts of him.”

— Michel de Montaigne

182. “The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.”

— Michel de Montaigne

183. “We find our energies are actually cramped when we are overanxious to succeed.”

— Michel de Montaigne

184. “The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.”

— Michel de Montaigne

185. “No spiritual mind remains within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its own strength.”

— Michel de Montaigne

186. “The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould.”

— Michel de Montaigne

187. “Intemperance is the plaque of sensuality, and temperance is not its bane but its seasoning.”

— Michel de Montaigne

188. “He who does not live in some degree for others, hardly lives for himself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

189. “I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

191. “To make a crooked stick straight, we bend it the contrary way.”

— Michel de Montaigne

192. “No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.”

— Michel de Montaigne

193. “The study of books is a drowsy and feeble exercise which does not warm you up.”

— Michel de Montaigne

194. “Women when they marry buy a cat in the bag.”

— Michel de Montaigne

195. “A person is bound to lose when he talks about himself; if he belittles himself, he is believed; if he praises himself, he isn’t believed.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

197. “It takes so much to be a king that he exists only as such. That extraneous glare that surrounds him hides him and conceals him from us; our sight breaks and is dissipated by it being filled and arrested by this strong light.”

— Michel de Montaigne

198. “Men of simple understanding, little inquisitive and little instructed, make good Christians.”

— Michel de Montaigne

199. “A man must become wise at his own expense.”

— Michel de Montaigne

200. “Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.”

— Michel de Montaigne