"Man in sooth is a marvellous, vain, fickle, and unstable subject."
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Quote collection
Michel de Montaigne quotes (page 4 of 49)
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"Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee."
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"I quote others only in order the better to express myself."
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"If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it."
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"It is not necessity but abundance which produces greed."
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"He who does not live in some degree for others, hardly lives for himself."
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"We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade."
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"When I am attached by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind."
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"I am myself the matter of my book."
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"Princes give mee sufficiently, if they take nothing from me, and doe me much good, if they doe me no hurt: it is all I require of them."
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"I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please."
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"The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts, and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible."
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"A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom."
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"Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies."
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"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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"When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself."
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"The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould"
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"It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it."
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"Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it."
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"There is no wish more natural than the wish to know."
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