Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.”

— Michel de Montaigne

202. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

204. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

207. “The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

211. “The strength of any plan depends on the time. Circumstances and things eternally shift and change.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

213. “Every movement reveals us.”

— Michel de Montaigne

214. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

216. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

218. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

220. “A volunteer, you assign yourself specific roles and risks according to your judgement of their brilliance and importance, and you see when life itself may be justifiably devoted to them.”

— Michel de Montaigne

221. “A learned man is not learned in all things; but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout, even to ignorance itself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

222. “Natural inclinations are assisted and reinforced by education, but they are hardly ever altered or overcome.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

224. “Pride dwells in the thought; the tongue can have but a very little share in it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

225. “Time steals away without any inconvenience.”

— Michel de Montaigne

226. “To die is not to play a part in society; it is the act of a single person. Let us live and laugh among our friends; let us die and sulk among strangers.”

— Michel de Montaigne

227. “Scratching is one of nature’s sweetest gratifications, and the one nearest at hand.”

— Michel de Montaigne

228. “To know much is often the cause of doubting more.”

— Michel de Montaigne

229. “And not to serve for a table-talk.”

— Michel de Montaigne

230. “Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.”

— Michel de Montaigne

231. “Neither good nor ill is done to us by Fortune: she merely offers us the matter and the seeds: our soul, more powerful than she is, can mould it or sow them as she pleases, being the only cause and mistress of our happy state or our unhappiness.”

— Michel de Montaigne

232. “To make judgements about great and lofty things, a soul of the same stature is needed; otherwise we ascribe to them that vice which is our own.”

— Michel de Montaigne

233. “Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being.”

— Michel de Montaigne

234. “How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!”

— Michel de Montaigne

235. “If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.”

— Michel de Montaigne

236. “Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.”

— Michel de Montaigne

237. “A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.”

— Michel de Montaigne

238. “In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.”

— Michel de Montaigne

239. “Who so hath his mind on taking, hath it no more on what he taketh.”

— Michel de Montaigne

240. “The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learnt to die has forgot to serve.”

— Michel de Montaigne

241. “Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.”

— Michel de Montaigne

242. “Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.”

— Michel de Montaigne

243. “Age imprints more wrinkles a in the mind, than it does in the face, and souls are never, or very rarely seen, that in growing old do not smell sour and musty. Man moves all together, both towards his perfection and decay.”

— Michel de Montaigne

244. “What kind of truth is this which is true on one side of a mountain and false on the other?”

— Michel de Montaigne

245. “I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.”

— Michel de Montaigne

246. “I would have every man write what he knows and no more.”

— Michel de Montaigne

247. “It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.”

— Michel de Montaigne

248. “No one but yourself knows whether you are cowardly and cruel, or loyal and devout; others do not see you; they surmise you by uncertain conjectures; they perceive not so much your nature as your art.”

— Michel de Montaigne

249. “Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.”

— Michel de Montaigne

250. “The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion-the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt-both with the common motion and with their own.”

— Michel de Montaigne