Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “Desire and hope will push us on toward the future.”

— Michel de Montaigne

252. “The profit we possess after study is to have become better and wiser.”

— Michel de Montaigne

253. “We are all of us richer than we think we are.”

— Michel de Montaigne

254. “If your doctor does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat of a particular dish, do not worry; I will find you another who will not agree with him.”

— Michel de Montaigne

255. “Wine is the benevolent god, who gives back gaiety to men and restores youth to the old.”

— Michel de Montaigne

256. “The lack of wealth is easily repaired but the poverty of the soul is irreplaceable.”

— Michel de Montaigne

257. “Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other.”

— Michel de Montaigne

258. “Dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them.”

— Michel de Montaigne

259. “Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think.”

— Michel de Montaigne

260. “To philosophize is to doubt.”

— Michel de Montaigne

261. “He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.”

— Michel de Montaigne

262. “The confidence in another man’s virtue is no light evidence of a man’s own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.”

— Michel de Montaigne

263. “I do not portray the thing in itself. I portray the passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people put it, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute.”

— Michel de Montaigne

264. “Knowledge is an excellent drug; but no drug has virtue enough to preserve itself from corruption and decay, if the vessel be tainted and impure wherein it is put to keep.”

— Michel de Montaigne

265. “Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.”

— Michel de Montaigne

266. “One may be humble out of pride.”

— Michel de Montaigne

267. “I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate.”

— Michel de Montaigne

268. “Oh these foolish men! They could not create so much as a worm, but they create gods by the dozens.”

— Michel de Montaigne

269. “A man should think less of what he eats and more with whom he eats because no food is so satisfying as good company.”

— Michel de Montaigne

270. “Friendship that possesses the whole soul, and there rules and sways with an absolute sovereignty, can admit of no rival.”

— Michel de Montaigne

271. “The beauty of stature is the only beauty of men.”

— Michel de Montaigne

272. “There is no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.”

— Michel de Montaigne

273. “Habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgment.”

— Michel de Montaigne

274. “Friendship is a creature formed for a companionship not for a herd.”

— Michel de Montaigne

275. “Repentance is no other than a recanting of the will, and opposition to our fancies, which lead us which way they please.”

— Michel de Montaigne

276. “We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear enough and free from clouds.”

— Michel de Montaigne

277. “We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him.”

— Michel de Montaigne

278. “No-one is exempt from speaking nonsense – the only misfortune is to do it solemnly.”

— Michel de Montaigne

279. “We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves; fear, desire, hope, still push us on toward the future.”

— Michel de Montaigne

280. “He who falls obstinate in his courage, if he falls he fights from his knees.”

— Michel de Montaigne

281. “All permanent decisions are made in a temporary state of mind.”

— Michel de Montaigne

282. “To smell, though well, is to stink.”

— Michel de Montaigne

283. “The most evident token and apparent sign of true wisdom is a constant and unconstrained rejoicing.”

— Michel de Montaigne

284. “It would be better to have no laws at all, than to have too many.”

— Michel de Montaigne

285. “Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.”

— Michel de Montaigne

286. “He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met to be the sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.”

— Michel de Montaigne

287. “Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly.”

— Michel de Montaigne

288. “Obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigor and stability.”

— Michel de Montaigne

289. “Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.”

— Michel de Montaigne

290. “If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

291. “Things are not bad in themselves, but our cowardice makes them so.”

— Michel de Montaigne

292. “I am myself the matter of my book.”

— Michel de Montaigne

293. “Man will rise, if God by exception lends him a hand; he will rise by abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himselfbe raised and uplifted by purely celestial means.”

— Michel de Montaigne

294. “I see several animals that live so entire and perfect a life, some without sight, others without hearing: who knows whether to us also one, two, or three, or many other senses, may not be wanting?”

— Michel de Montaigne

295. “My reason is not framed to bend or stoop: my knees are.”

— Michel de Montaigne

296. “The world is but a perpetual see-saw.”

— Michel de Montaigne

297. “The Emperor Conrad III had besieged Guelph, Duke of Bavaria; no matter how base and cowardly were the satisfactions offered him, the most generous condition he would vouchsafe was to allow the noblewomen who had been besieged with the Duke to come out honourably on foot, together with whatever they could carry on their persons. They, with greatness of heart, decided to carry out on their shoulders their husbands, their children and the Duke himself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

298. “We are born to inquire after truth; it belongs to a greater power to possess it. It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine knowledge.”

— Michel de Montaigne

299. “The most profound joy has more of gravity than of gaiety in it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

300. “To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct.”

— Michel de Montaigne