"Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged."
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Quote collection
Michel de Montaigne quotes (page 43 of 49)
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"T is one and the same Nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past."
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"The sage says that all that is under heaven incurs the same law and the same fate."
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"Seneca's virtue shows forth so live and vigorous in his writings, and the defense is so clear there against some of these imputations, as that of his wealth and excessive spending, that I would not believe any testimony to the contrary."
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"Virtue cannot be followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some other purpose, she presently pulls it away again."
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"What kind of truth is it which has these mountains as its boundary and is a lie beyond them?"
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"Children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions."
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"No man divulges his revenue, or at least which way it comes in: but every one publishes his acquisitions."
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"All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate."
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"How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?"
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"Men ... are not agreed about any one thing, not even that heaven is over our heads."
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"Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: "I settle nothing. . . . I do not understand it. . . . Nothing seems true that may not seem false." Their sacramental word is . . . , which is to say, I suspend my judgment."
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"Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it."
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"The easy, gentle, and sloping path . . . is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road."
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"I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion."
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"And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together."
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"There is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy."
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"It is equally pointless to weep because we won't be alive a hundred years from now as that we were not here a hundred years ago."
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"The laws of conscience, though we ascribe them to nature, actually come from custom."
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"I admire the assurance and confidence everyone has in himself, whereas there is hardly anything I am sure I know or that I dare give my word I can do."
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