Michel de Montaigne Quotes

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

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

Mon métier et mon art, c'est vivre.

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

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.

For my own part, I cannot without grief see so much as an innocent beast pursued and killed that has no defence, and from which we have received no offence at all.

the property of Man’s wit to act readily and quickly, while the property of the judgement is to be slow and poised.

We thought we were tying our marriage-knots more tightly by removing all means of undoing them;22 but the tighter we pulled the knot of constraint the looser and slacker became the knot of our will and affection. In Rome, on the contrary, what made marriages honoured and secure for so long a period was freedom to break them at will. Men loved their wives more because they could lose them; and during a period when anyone was quite free to divorce, more than five hundred years went by before a single one did

For in truth habit is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She establishes in us, little by little, stealthily, the foothold of her authority; but having by this mild and humble beginning settled and planted it with the help of time, she soon uncovers to us a furious and tyrannical face against which we no longer have the liberty of even raising our eyes.

And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one.

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

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.

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

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

Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself.