Quote collection
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"A town, a landscape are when seen from afar a town and a landscape; but as one gets nearer, there are houses, trees, tiles leaves, grasses, ants, legs of ants and so on to infinity. All this is subsumed under the name of landscape."
"Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true."
"Knowledge has two extremes. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same natural ignorance from which they set out; this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself."
"Flies are so mighty that they win battles, paralyse our minds, eat up our bodies."
"Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait."
"We see neither justice nor injustice which does not change its nature with change in climate. Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides the truth."
"Men are so completely fools by necessity that he is but a fool in a higher strain of folly who does not confess his foolishness."
"Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature."
"If men knew themselves, God would heal and pardon them."
"(Man,) the glory and the scandal of the universe."
"It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him."
"Thought makes the whole dignity of man; therefore endeavor to think well, that is the only morality."
"It is the contest that delights us, and not the victory."
"The incredulous are the more credulous. They believe the miracles of Vespasian that they may not believe those of Moses. [Fr., Incredules les plus credules. Ils croient les miracle de Vespasien, pour ne pas croire ceux de Moise.]"
"All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions.... This is the motive of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves."
"Amusement that is excessive and followed only for its own sake, allures and deceives us."
"Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you - will quiet your proudly critical intellect."
"Nothing is surer than that the people will be weak."
"We do not weary of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger and sleepiness recur. Without that we should weary of them. So, without the hunger for spiritual things, we weary of them. Hunger after righteousness--the eighth beatitude."
"Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature."