"There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgment as doth anger"
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
Michel de Montaigne quotes (page 16 of 49)
979 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice."
Read quote
6 likes
"Glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place."
Read quote
6 likes
"Let us a little permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we."
Read quote
6 likes
"Courtesy, like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and inclination to love one another at the first sight, and in the very beginning of our acquaintance and familiarity; and, consequently, that which first opens the door for us to better ourselves by the example of others, if there be anything in the society worth notice"
Read quote
6 likes
"It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness."
Read quote
6 likes
"Plenty and indigence depend upon the opinion every one has of them; and riches, like glory of health, have no more beauty or pleasure than their possessor is pleaded to lend them."
Read quote
6 likes
"The secret counsels of princes are a troublesome burden to such as have only to execute them."
Read quote
6 likes
"You have your face bare; I am all face."
Read quote
6 likes
"Why dost thou complain of this world? It detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain."
Read quote
6 likes
"Who ever saw a doctor use the prescription of his colleague without cutting out or adding something?"
Read quote
6 likes
"Socrates and then Archesilaus used to make their pupils speak first; they spoke afterwards. 'Obest plerumque iss discere volunt authoritas eorum qui docent.' [For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be the authority of those who teach]"
Read quote
6 likes
"I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden."
Read quote
6 likes
"It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"It has never occurred to me to wish for empire or royalty, nor for the eminence of those high and commanding fortunes. My aim lies not in that direction; I love myself too well."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct."
Read quote
6 likes
"My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable."
Read quote
6 likes
"The concern that some women show at the absence of their husbands, does not arise from their not seeing them and being with them, but from their apprehension that their husbands are enjoying pleasures in which they do not participate, and which, from their being at a distance, they have not the power of interrupting."
Read quote
6 likes