Michel de Montaigne Quotes - Page 21

• The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Soul, Finest, Variety

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• Is there anything so grave and serious as an ass?

  Michel de Montaigne

  Serious, Ass, Graves

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• The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Practice, Customs

  Michel de Montaigne (1991). “The essays of Michel de Montaigne”, Lane, Allen

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• We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Marriage, Race, Practice

  Michel de Montaigne (2003). “The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters”, Everyman's Library

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• A well-bred man is always sociable and complaisant.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Men, Manners, Wells

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• One should be ever booted and spurred and ready to depart.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Dying, Death And Dying, Should

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• And as hearbes and trees are bettered and fortified by being transplanted, so formes of speach are embellished and graced by variation.... As in our ordinary language, we shall sometimes meete with excellent phrases, and quaint metaphors, whose blithnesse fadeth through age, and colour is tarnish by to common using them.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Tree, Age, Ordinary

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• There never were, in the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Two, Hair, Justice

  Michel de Montaigne (2015). “Essays of Montaigne”, p.922, Xist Publishing

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

  Michel de Montaigne

  Stupid, Silly, Want

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• Lucius Arruntius killed himself, he said, to escape both the future and the past.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Past, Said

  Michel de Montaigne (1979). “Essays”

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• Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener. The latter must prepare to receive it according to the motion it takes.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Communication, Listening, Half

  Michel de Montaigne (1980). “Essays”

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

  Michel de Montaigne

  Law, Morality, Tradition

  Michel de Montaigne (1859). “Works of Michael de Montaigne: Comprising His Essays, Journey Into Italy, and Letters, with Notes from All the Commentators, Biographical and Bibliographical Notices, Etc”, p.171

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• 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.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Believe, Limits, Stranger

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.134, Stanford University Press

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• We are born to inquire after truth; it belongs to a greater power to possess it. It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine knowledge.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Height, Infinite, Divine

  Michel de Montaigne (2015). “Montaigne's Essays: Top Essays”, p.952, 谷月社

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

  Michel de Montaigne

  Please Me, Sake, Walks

  Michel de Montaigne (1877). “Essays”, p.257

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• Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Death, Dying, Obligation

  Attributed to "Essais" by Michel de Montaigne, Book I, Ch. 7, 1595.

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• I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Law, Numbers, Justice

  Michel de Montaigne, Bayle St. John (1866). “Essays [tr. by Cotton”, p.400

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• Men are nothing until they are excited.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Men, Excited

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• We are Christians by the same title as we are natives of Perigord or Germany.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Christian, Titles, Germany

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• 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

  Philosophy, Medicine, Psychology

  Michel de Montaigne (1946). “The essays”

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• Is it not enough to make me come back to life out of spite, to have someone who spat in my face while I existed come and rub my feet when I am beginning to exist no longer?

  Michel de Montaigne

  Feet, Hypocrisy, Faces

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.563, Stanford University Press

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• No man dies before his hour. The time you leave behind was no more yours, than that which was before your birth, and concerneth you no more.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Death, Men, Birth

  Michel de Montaigne (2014). “Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays, A Selection”, p.31, New York Review of Books

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• He loves little who loves by rule.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Life, Littles

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• There are few things on which we can pass a sincere judgement, because there are few things in which we have not, in one way or another, a particular interest.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Judgement, Way, Judgment

  Michel de Montaigne (1946). “The essays”

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• He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Men, Evil, Ordinary

  Michel de Montaigne (1980). “Essays”

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