"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly."
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Quote collection
Michel de Montaigne quotes (page 2 of 49)
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"God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand."
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"No pleasure has any savor for me without communication."
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"The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere."
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"When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly."
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"Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages."
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"We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom."
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"I want death to find me planting my cabbages."
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"On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom."
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"Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself."
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"When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her."
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"Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart. If I were pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that my only reply could be: Because it was he, because it was I."
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"My home...It is my retreat and resting place from wars, I try to keep this corner as a haven against the tempest outside, as I do another corner in my soul."
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"A man must become wise at his own expense."
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"I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing."
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"To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most."
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"There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants."
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"There is no more expensive thing than a free gift."
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"To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere." "To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave."
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"He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak."
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