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Knowledge
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I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Language
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Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.
-Michel de Montaigne, 1580
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Law
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Laws are often made by fools, and even more often by men who fail in equity because they hate equality: but always by men, vain authorities who can resolve nothing.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.
-Michel de Montaigne
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It would be better to have no laws at all, than to have too many.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Life
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My art and profession is to live.
-Michel de Montaigne
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The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.
-Michel de Montaigne
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We are great fools: He has spent his life in idleness. We say, I have done nothing today. Really, have you not lived? This is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations
-Michel de Montaigne, Of Experience
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Listening
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The word is half his that speaks, and half his that hears it.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Mankind, Man
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Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Marriage
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We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out.
-Michel de Montaigne
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If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.
-Michel de Montaigne
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A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Medicine
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I was not long since in a company where I was not who of my fraternity brought news of a kind of pills, by true account, composed of a hundred and odd several ingredients; whereat we laughed very heartily, and made ourselves good sport; for what rock so hard were able to resist the shock or withstand the force of so thick and numerous a battery?
-Michel de Montaigne
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Memory
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The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.
-Michel de Montaigne
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He who has not a good memory should never take upon himself the trade of lying.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Memory is the receptacle and case of science: and therefore mine being so treacherous, if I know little, I cannot much complain. I know, in general, the names of the arts, and of what they treat, but nothing more. I turn over books; I do not study them. What I retain I no longerrecognise as another's; 'tis only what my judgment has made its advantage of, the discourses and imaginations in which it has been instructed: the author, place, words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget; and I am so excellent at forgetting, that I no less forget my own writingsand compositions than the rest. I am very often quoted to myself, and am not aware of it. Whoever should inquire of me where I had the verses and examples, that I have here huddled together, would puzzle me to tell him, and yet I have not borrowed them but from famous and known authors, not contenting myself that they were rich, if I, moreover, had them not from rich and honourable hands, where there is a concurrence of authority with reason. It is no great wonder if my book run the same fortune that otherbooks do, if my memory lose what I have written as well as what I have read, and what I give, as well as what I receive.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Men
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It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.
-Michel de Montaigne
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The most unhappy and frail creatures are men and yet they are the proudest.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Military, the
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No profession or occupation is more pleasing than the military; a profession or exercise both noble in execution (for the strongest, most generous and proudest of all virtues is true valor) and noble in its cause. No utility either more just or universal than the protection of the repose or defense of the greatness of one's country. The company and daily conversation of so many noble, young and active men cannot but be well-pleasing to you.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Mind, the
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Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like silkworms, and is suffocated in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel...thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Miracles
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I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Money
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Taking it all in all, I find it is more trouble to watch after money than to get it.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Nature
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Let Nature have her way; she understands her business better than we do.
-Michel de Montaigne
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Books by and about Michel de Montaigne