Michel de Montaigne

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
― The Complete Essays

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
― The Complete Essays

I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
― The Complete Essays

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.
― Les Essais

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.
― The Complete Essays

If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.
― The Complete Essays

Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.
― The Complete Essays

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
― The Complete Essays

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.
― The Complete Essays

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.
― The Complete Essays

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
― The Complete Essays

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
― The Complete Essays

Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?
― The Complete Essays

To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.

If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.

I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.
― The Complete Essays

Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.
― Essays

I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older.

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere.

To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

My art and profession is to live.

Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.
― The Complete Essays

There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.

The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.
― The Complete Essays

Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
― The Essays: A Selection

Every man has within himself the entire human condition.

I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.
― The Complete Essays

He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.

Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.

[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.
― The Complete Essays

There is no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.

Every movement reveals us.
― The Complete Essays

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself

Que sçais-je? (What do I know?)

I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other.

No-one is exempt from speaking nonsense – the only misfortune is to do it solemnly.

Why do people respect the package rather than the man?
― The Complete Essays

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.

No wind favors he who has no destined port.
― The Complete Essays

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
― The Complete Essays

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.

There is no desire more natural than the desire of knowledge. (Il n'est desir plus naturel que le desir de connaissance)
― Essays

I listen with attention to the judgment of all men; but so far as I can remember, I have followed none but my own.

Kings and philosophers shit—and so do ladies.

Other people do not see you at all, but guess at you by uncertain conjectures.
― The Complete Essays

Saying is one thing and doing is another.

We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.
― The Essays: A Selection

If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.

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.
― The Complete Essays

I want us to be doing things, prolonging life's duties as much as we can. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.

I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.

The thing I fear most is fear.
― The Complete Essays

Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears. I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.

Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.
― The Essays: A Selection

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.
― The Complete Essays

Don't discuss yourself, for you are bound to lose; if you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved.

Behold the hands, how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate, refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command, mock and what not besides, with a variation and multiplication of variation which makes the tongue envious.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make to them; a man may live long, yet get little from life. Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.
― Essays

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

There are no truths, only moments of claryty passing for answers.

I had rather fashion my mind than furnish it.

Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and make it part of himself, judging the boy's progress by what Plato taught about education. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given.
― The Essays: A Selection

The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness.
― The Complete Essays

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.

If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be explained by replying: 'Because it was he; because it was me.
― The Complete Essays

The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live with purpose.

Pride and curiosity are the two scourges of our souls. The latter prompts us to poke our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.
― The Essays: A Selection

There is no more expensive thing than a free gift.

Let every foot have its own shoe.
― The Essays: A Selection

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.
― The Complete Essays

One must be a little foolish if one does not want to be even more stupid.

Experience has further taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.

The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.

Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.
― The Complete Essays

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.

Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.

I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.
Thus Diogenes, who pottered about by himself, rolling his tub and turning up his nose at the great Alexander, considering us as flies or bags of wind, was really a sharper and more stinging judge, to my taste, than Timon, who was surnamed the hater of men. For what we hate we take seriously. Timon wished us ill, passionately desired our ruin, shunned association with us as dangerous, as with wicked men depraved by nature. Diogenes esteemed us so little that contact with us could neither disturb him nor affect him, and avoided our company, not through fear of association with us, but through disdain of it; he considered us incapable of doing either good or evil....
Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.
― The Complete Works

Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured. For if he embraces Xenophon's and Plato's opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. He who follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing; indeed he seeks nothing. We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom [Seneca]. Let him know that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later. It is no more according to Plato than according to me, since he and I understand and see it the same way. The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.

Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.

The soul in which philosophy dwells should by its health make even the body healthy. It should make its tranquillity and gladness shine out from within; should form in its own mold the outward demeanor, and consequently arm it with a graceful pride, an active and joyous bearing, and a contented and good-natured countenance. The surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.
― The Complete Works

Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing.
― The Complete Essays

Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.
― The Complete Essays

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.
― The Essays: A Selection

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

Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.
― The Essays: A Selection

Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.

We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship, for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him.

The continuous work of our life is to build death.

I speak to the paper, as I speak to the first person I meet.
― The Complete Essays

My business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk's sake.
― The Complete Essays

If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.

I had rather complain of ill-fortune than be ashamed of victory.
― The Complete Essays

Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them.
― The Complete Essays

All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own.
― The Complete Essays

We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.
― The Complete Essays

My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.

Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle's principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicureans. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured. For if he embraces Xenophon's and Plato's opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. He who follows another follows nothing. He finds nothing; indeed he seeks nothing. We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom. Let him know that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later. It is no more according to Plato than according to me, since he and I understand and see it the same way. The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.
― The Complete Works

There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.
― The Complete Essays

It is a small soul, buried beneath the weight of affairs, that does not know how to get clean away from them, that cannot put them aside and pick them up again.

There is indeed a certain sense of gratification when we do a good deed that gives us inward satisfaction, and a generous pride that accompanies a good conscience…These testimonies of a good conscience are pleasant; and such a natural pleasure is very beneficial to us; it is the only payment that can never fail.

How many things were articles of faith to us yesterday that are fables to us today?

Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.
― The Complete Essays

We should tend our freedom wisely.
― The Complete Essays

The beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things.

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.

Whoever will be cured of ignorance, let him confess it.

He who fears he will suffer, already suffers from his fear.

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.

It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.

When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them.

No spirited mind remains within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its power of achievement.

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.

We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of dischords as well as different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life.

No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.

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

Better to be tentative than to be recklessly sure- to be an apprentice at sixty, than to present oneself as a doctor at ten.

Between ourselves, there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.
― The Complete Essays

In our time the most warlike nations are the most rude and ignorant.
― The Complete Essays

No one should be subjected to force over things which belonged to him.
― The Complete Essays

It is only certain that there is nothing certain, and that nothing is more miserable or more proud than man.

Natural inclinations are assisted and reinforced by education, but they are hardly ever altered or overcome.

Such as are in immediate fear of a losing their estates, of banishment, or of slavery, live in perpetual anguish, and lose all appetite and repose; whereas such as are actually poor, slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk.
― The Complete Essays

How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among the friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out.

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.

We are all blockheads.

We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe, we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.

Human understanding is marvelously 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.

Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.
(There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.)
― The Complete Essays

The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live to the point.

People try to get out of themselves and to escape from the man. This is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they turn into beast; instead of lifting, they degrade themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible heights.
― The Complete Essays

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.

From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well...
― On Solitude

What hits you affects you and wakes you up more then what pleases you.
― On Friendship

The man who establishes his argument by noise and command knows that his reason is weak.

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.

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

If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men.

In general I ask for books that make use of learning, not those that build it up.

I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood.... I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world.

Death is not one of our social managements; it is a scene with one character.

Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!

To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing; we must learn that we are nothing but fools, a far broader and more important lesson.

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

Were our pupil's disposition so bizarre that he would rather hear a tall story than the account of a great voyage or a wise discussion; that at the sound of a drum calling the youthful ardour of his comrades to arms he would turn aside for the drum of a troop of jugglers; that he would actually find it no more delightful and pleasant to return victorious covered in the dust of battle than after winning a prize for tennis or dancing; then I know no remedy except that his tutor should quickly strangle him when nobody is looking or apprentice him to make fairy-cakes in some goodly town - even if he were the heir of a Duke - following Plato's precept that functions should be allocated not according to the endowments of men's fathers but the endowments of their souls.
― The Essays: A Selection

The pettiest and slightest nuisances are the most acute; and as small letters hurt and tire the eyes most, so do trifling matters sting us most.

The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.
― The Complete Essays

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.

There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.

This, reader, is an honest book...I want to appear in my simple, natural and everyday dress, without strain or artifice; for it is myself that I portray

That is why Bias jested with those who were going through the perils of a great storm with him and calling on the gods for help: Shut up, he said, so that they do not realize that you are here with me.
― The Essays: A Selection

If any one should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I feel it could no otherwise be expressed than by making answer, ‘Because it was he; because it was I.’ There is, beyond what I am able to say, I know not what inexplicable and inevitable power that brought on this union.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

Meditation is a powerful and full study as can effectually taste and employ themselves.
― The Complete Essays