Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “Let every foot have its own shoe.”

— Michel de Montaigne

302. “I do not understand; I pause; I examine.”

— Michel de Montaigne

303. “The daughter-in-law of Pythagoras said that a woman who goes to bed with a man ought to lay aside her modesty with her skirt, and put it on again with her petticoat.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

305. “Lying is a terrible vice, it testifies that one despises God, but fears men.”

— Michel de Montaigne

306. “Disappointment and feebleness imprint upon us a cowardly and valetudinarian virtue.”

— Michel de Montaigne

307. “Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.”

— Michel de Montaigne

308. “We judge a horse not only by its pace on a racecourse, but also by its walk, nay, when resting in its stable.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

310. “The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.”

— Michel de Montaigne

311. “It needs courage to be afraid.”

— Michel de Montaigne

312. “How many condemnations I have witnessed more criminal than the crime!”

— Michel de Montaigne

313. “Even in the midst of compassion we feel within I know not what tart sweet titillation of malicious pleasure in seeing others suffer; children have the same feeling.”

— Michel de Montaigne

314. “Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from whathe is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.”

— Michel de Montaigne

315. “The beginnings of all things are weak and tender. We must therefore be clear-sighted in the beginnings, for, as in their budding we discern not the danger, so in their full growth we perceive not the remedy.”

— Michel de Montaigne

316. “Books are a languid pleasure.”

— Michel de Montaigne

317. “The soul that has no established aim loses itself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

318. “Happiness is a singular incentive to mediocrity.”

— Michel de Montaigne

319. “To say less of yourself than is true is stupidity, not modesty. To pay yourself less than you are worth is cowardice and pusillanimity.”

— Michel de Montaigne

320. “Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.”

— Michel de Montaigne

321. “I never met a man who thought his thinking was faulty.”

— Michel de Montaigne

322. “No pleasure is fully delightful without communications, and no delight absolute except imparted.”

— Michel de Montaigne

323. “And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore, Farewell:.”

— Michel de Montaigne

324. “Who is it that does not voluntarily exchange his health, his repose, and his very life for reputation and glory? The most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes current among us.”

— Michel de Montaigne

325. “Marriage can be compared to a cage: birds outside it despair to enter, and birds within, to escape.”

— Michel de Montaigne

326. “When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure.”

— Michel de Montaigne

327. “A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children’s affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection.”

— Michel de Montaigne

328. “In my opinion it is the happy living, and not, as Antisthenes said, the happy lying, in which human happiness consists.”

— Michel de Montaigne

329. “Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.”

— Michel de Montaigne

330. “Not only does the wind of accidents stir me according to its blowing, but I am also stirred and troubled by the instability of my attitude.”

— Michel de Montaigne

331. “Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us.”

— Michel de Montaigne

332. “Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.”

— Michel de Montaigne

333. “We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us.”

— Michel de Montaigne

334. “Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.”

— Michel de Montaigne

335. “Judgement holds in me a magisterial seat, at least it carefully tries to. It lets my feelings go their way, both hatred and friendship, even the friendship I bear myself, without being changed and corrupted by them.”

— Michel de Montaigne

336. “The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly.”

— Michel de Montaigne

337. “There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgment as doth anger.”

— Michel de Montaigne

338. “No man profiteth but by the loss of others.”

— Michel de Montaigne

339. “Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.”

— Michel de Montaigne

340. “The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life .”

— Michel de Montaigne

341. “Nature has made us a present of a broad capacity for entertaining ourselves apart, and often calls us to do so, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but in the best part to ourselves.”

— Michel de Montaigne

342. “There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are great and handsome ornaments, but we buy them too dear.”

— Michel de Montaigne

343. “Children’s playthings are not sports and should be deemed as their most serious actions.”

— Michel de Montaigne

344. “Diogenes was asked what wine he liked best; and he answered as I would have done when he said, “Somebody else’s”.”

— Michel de Montaigne

345. “The man who thinks he knows does not yet know what knowing is.”

— Michel de Montaigne

346. “The honor of the conquest is rated by the difficulty.”

— Michel de Montaigne

347. “It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.”

— Michel de Montaigne

348. “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.”

— Michel de Montaigne

349. “The clatter of arms drowns out the voice of law.”

— Michel de Montaigne

350. “Unless a man feels he has a good enough memory, he should never venture to lie.”

— Michel de Montaigne