Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Friendship is a creature formed for a companionship not for a herd.”

— Michel de Montaigne

302. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

304. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

307. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

314. “Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

315. “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

316. “And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?”

— Michel de Montaigne

317. “Let every foot have its own shoe.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

320. “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

321. “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

322. “Every man carries the entire form of human condition.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

324. “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

325. “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

326. “It needs courage to be afraid.”

— Michel de Montaigne

327. “Why do people respect the package rather than the man?”

— Michel de Montaigne

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

331. “Nothing else but an insatiate thirst of enjoying a greedily desired object.”

— Michel de Montaigne

332. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

334. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

337. “Books are a languid pleasure.”

— Michel de Montaigne

338. “The plague of man is the opinion of knowledge. That is why ignorance is so recommended by our religion as a quality suitable to belief and obedience.”

— Michel de Montaigne

339. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

346. “The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.”

— Michel de Montaigne

347. “May God defend me from myself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

348. “Taking it all in all, I find it is more trouble to watch after money than to get it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

349. “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

350. “I am disgusted with innovation, in whatever guise, and with reason, for I have seen very harmful effects of it.”

— Michel de Montaigne