Michel de Montaigne Quotes

C'est ce de quoi j'ai le plus de peur que la peur.

We are brought to a belief of God either by reason or by force. Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. Yet will they not fail to lift up their hands towards heaven if you give them a good thrust with a sword in the breast, and when fear or sickness has abated and dulled the licentious fury of this giddy humour they will easily re-unite, and very discreetly suffer themselves to be reconciled to the public faith and examples.

The usefulness of living lies not in duration but in what you make of it. Some have lived long and lived little. See to it while you are still here. Whether you have lived enough depends not on a count of years but on your will.

Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.

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

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

Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: “it seems to me.” They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible.

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.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

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

The public weal requires that men should betray and lie and massacre.

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

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.

To obey is the proper office of a rational soul.