Top 500 Michel de Montaigne Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

408. “Every movement reveals us.”

— Michel de Montaigne

409. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

417. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

419. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

422. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

428. “Who ever saw a doctor use the prescription of his colleague without cutting out or adding something?”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

431. “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

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

— Michel de Montaigne

433. “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

434. “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

435. “To know how to live is my trade and my art.”

— Michel de Montaigne

436. “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

437. “We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty; but an advantage in judgment we yield to none.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

439. “I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

441. “When all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; his accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never.”

— Michel de Montaigne

442. “Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

444. “I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.”

— Michel de Montaigne

445. “Necessity is a violent school-mistress.”

— Michel de Montaigne

446. “Decency, not to dare to do that in public which it is decent enough to do in private.”

— Michel de Montaigne

447. “And I loathe people who find it harder to put up with a gown askew than with a soul askew and who judge a man by his bow, his bearing and his boots.”

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

449. “The world is but a school of inquisition; it is not who shall enter the ring, but who shall run the best courses.”

— Michel de Montaigne

450. “What fear has once made me will, I am bound still to will when without fear.”

— Michel de Montaigne