Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

353. “Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.”

— Michel de Montaigne

354. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

356. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

359. “In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.”

— Michel de Montaigne

360. “We feel a kind of bittersweet pricking of malicious delight in contemplating the misfortunes of others.”

— Michel de Montaigne

361. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

364. “Seneca’s virtue shows forth so live and vigorous in his writings, and the defense is so clear there against some of these imputations, as that of his wealth and excessive spending, that I would not believe any testimony to the contrary.”

— Michel de Montaigne

365. “It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

366. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

368. “Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not.”

— Michel de Montaigne

369. “I say that male and female are cast in the same mold; except for education and habits, the difference is not great.”

— Michel de Montaigne

370. “There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”

— Michel de Montaigne

371. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

373. “No doctor takes pleasure in the health even of his friends.”

— Michel de Montaigne

374. “Women are more susceptible to pain than to pleasure.”

— Michel de Montaigne

375. “It is not the want, but rather abundance that creates avarice.”

— Michel de Montaigne

376. “Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing.”

— Michel de Montaigne

377. “We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.”

— Michel de Montaigne

378. “Experience teaches that a strong memory is generally joined to a weak judgment.”

— Michel de Montaigne

379. “It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.”

— Michel de Montaigne

380. “The worst condition of humans is when they lose knowledge and control of themselves.”

— Michel de Montaigne

381. “There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants.”

— Michel de Montaigne

382. “The great and glorious masterpiece of men is to live to the point. All other things-to reign, to hoard, to build-are, at most, but inconsiderable props and appendages.”

— Michel de Montaigne

383. “We ought to love temperance for itself, and in obedience to God who has commanded it and chastity; but what I am forced to by catarrhs, or owe to the stone, is neither chastity nor temperance.”

— Michel de Montaigne

384. “When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing.”

— Michel de Montaigne

385. “Vice leaves repentance in the soul, like an ulcer in the flesh, which is always scratching and lacerating itself; for reason effaces all other griefs and sorrows, but it begets that of repentance.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

387. “Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter, and the seed, which our soul, more powerfully than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.”

— Michel de Montaigne

388. “Whoever will imagine a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgment without leaning or inclination, on any occasion whatever, hasa conception of Pyrrhonism.”

— Michel de Montaigne

389. “Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on credit.”

— Michel de Montaigne

390. “I had rather fashion my mind than furnish it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

391. “I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s.”

— Michel de Montaigne

392. “A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey.”

— Michel de Montaigne

393. “Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.”

— Michel de Montaigne

394. “Our religion is made to eradicate vices, instead it encourages them, covers them, and nurtures them.”

— Michel de Montaigne

395. “Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.”

— Michel de Montaigne

396. “Peoples nurtured on freedom and self-government judge any other form of polity to be deformed and unnatural. Those who are used to monarchy do the same .”

— Michel de Montaigne

397. “If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.”

— Michel de Montaigne

398. “From Obedience and submission comes all our virtues, and all sin is comes from self-opinion.”

— Michel de Montaigne

399. “Why dost thou complain of this world? It detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain.”

— Michel de Montaigne

400. “It is a stupid presumption to go about despising and condemning as false anything that seems to us improbable; this is a common fault in those who think they have more intelligence than the crowd.”

— Michel de Montaigne