Michel de Montaigne Quotes

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Michel de Montaigne

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : February 28, 1533

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

Michel de Montaigne

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.

Michel de Montaigne

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.

Michel de Montaigne

My trade and art is to live.

Michel de Montaigne

Unless a man feels he has a good enough memory, he should never venture to lie.

Michel de Montaigne

It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength.

Michel de Montaigne

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

Michel de Montaigne

Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of soul, impossible.

Michel de Montaigne

No pleasure has any savor for me without communication.

Michel de Montaigne

Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.

Michel de Montaigne

'Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.

Michel de Montaigne

Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

Michel de Montaigne

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.

Michel de Montaigne

Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.

Michel de Montaigne

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

Michel de Montaigne

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.

Michel de Montaigne

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

Michel de Montaigne

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

Michel de Montaigne

I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.

Michel de Montaigne

The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.

Michel de Montaigne