Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “It is not without good reason, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.”

— Michel de Montaigne

402. “Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another’s net.”

— Michel de Montaigne

403. “I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.”

— Michel de Montaigne

404. “What harm cause not those huge draughts or pictures which wanton youth with chalk or coals draw in each passage, wall or stairs of our great houses, whence a cruel contempt of our natural store is bred in them?”

— Michel de Montaigne

405. “How many worthy men have we known to survive their own reputation, who have seen and suffered the honor and glory most justly acquired in their youth, extinguished in their own presence?”

— Michel de Montaigne

406. “Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.”

— Michel de Montaigne

407. “When I am attached by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”

— Michel de Montaigne

408. “Death pays all debts.”

— Michel de Montaigne

409. “To distract myself from tiresome thoughts, I have only to resort to books; they easily draw my mind to themselves and away from other things.”

— Michel de Montaigne

410. “Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced? Is it not better to suspend your convictions than to get mixed up in these seditious and quarrelsome divisions?”

— Michel de Montaigne

411. “My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.”

— Michel de Montaigne

412. “There is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy.”

— Michel de Montaigne

413. “It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

414. “The wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.”

— Michel de Montaigne

415. “It is not my deeds that I write down, it is myself, my essence.”

— Michel de Montaigne

416. “Pleasure itself is painful at the bottom.”

— Michel de Montaigne

417. “It is a rare life that remains orderly even in private.”

— Michel de Montaigne

418. “Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he finds himself! not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in him alone belief gives itself being and reality.”

— Michel de Montaigne

419. “Wise men have more to learn of fools than fools of wise men.”

— Michel de Montaigne

420. “The archer who overshoots his mark does no better than he who falls short of it.”

— Michel de Montaigne

421. “A man of genius belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of nature, which is always everywhere the same.”

— Michel de Montaigne

422. “Truth and reason are common to everyone, and are no more his who spake them first than his who speaks them after.”

— Michel de Montaigne

423. “Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.”

— Michel de Montaigne

424. “Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground.”

— Michel de Montaigne

425. “Man in sooth is a marvellous, vain, fickle, and unstable subject.”

— Michel de Montaigne

426. “Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity.”

— Michel de Montaigne

427. “If you walk on stilts, you’re still walking on your feet. If you sit on the highest throne in the world, you’re still sitting on your ass.”

— Michel de Montaigne

428. “There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.”

— Michel de Montaigne

429. “A man should not so much respect what he eats, as with whom he eats.”

— Michel de Montaigne

430. “We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.”

— Michel de Montaigne

431. “To speak less of oneself than what one really is, is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under a man’s value, is pusillanimity and cowardice.”

— Michel de Montaigne

432. “No pleasure has any savor for me without communication.”

— Michel de Montaigne

433. “He whose mouth is out of taste says the wine is flat.”

— Michel de Montaigne

434. “For a desperate disease a desperate cure.”

— Michel de Montaigne

435. “Lucius Arruntius killed himself, he said, to escape both the future and the past.”

— Michel de Montaigne

436. “It is a disaster that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and always sends you away dissatisfied and fearful, whereas stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy and assurance.”

— Michel de Montaigne

437. “There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.”

— Michel de Montaigne

438. “We are more unhappy to see people ahead of us than happy to see people behind us.”

— Michel de Montaigne

439. “Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil’s alphabet – the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.”

— Michel de Montaigne

440. “If love and ambition should be in equal balance, and come to jostle with equal force, I make no doubt but that the last would win the prize.”

— Michel de Montaigne

441. “We must not attach knowledge to the mind; we have to incorporate it there.”

— Michel de Montaigne

442. “A man must live in the world and make the best of it, such as it is.”

— Michel de Montaigne

443. “Rash and incessant scolding runs into custom and renders itself despised.”

— Michel de Montaigne

444. “If health and a fair day smile upon me, I am a very good fellow; if a corn trouble my toe, I am sullen, out of humor, and inaccessible.”

— Michel de Montaigne

445. “Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest.”

— Michel de Montaigne

446. “The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.”

— Michel de Montaigne

447. “We have so much ill fortune as inconstancy, or so much bad purpose as folly, we are not so full of evil as we are of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are base.”

— Michel de Montaigne

448. “The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.”

— Michel de Montaigne

449. “Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path.”

— Michel de Montaigne

450. “Glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place.”

— Michel de Montaigne