Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
38 quotes
"The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar."
"L'utilité du vivre n'est pas en l'espace: elle est en l'usage."
"Heureuse la mort qui oste le loisir aux apprests de tel equipage."
"D'autant que nous avons cher, estre, et estre consiste en mouvement et action."
"L'honneste est stable et permanent."
"J'accuse toute violence en l'education d'une ame tendre, qu'on dresse pour l'honneur, et la liberté."
"Je hay entre autres vices, cruellement la cruauté, et par nature et par jugement, comme l'extreme de tous les vices."
"Il n'est rien qui tente mes larmes que les larmes."
"Les naturels sanguinaires à l'endroit des bestes, tesmoignent une propension naturelle à la cruauté."
"Nature a, (ce crains-je) elle mesme attaché à l'homme quelque instinct à l'inhumanité"
"Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents."
"All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth."
"...were these Essays of mine considerable enough to deserve a critical judgment, it might then, I think, fallout that they would not much take with common and vulgar capacities, nor be very acceptable to the singular and excellent sort of men; the first would not understand them enough, and the last too much; and so they may hover in the middle region."
"Did I know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to the bottom, and to be deceived in my own inability; but sprinkling here one word and there another, patterns cut from severalpieces and scattered without design and without engaging myself too far, I am not responsible for them, or obliged to keep close to my subject, without varying at my own liberty and pleasure, and giving up myself to doubt and uncertainty, and to myown governing method, ignorance."
"The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough."
"We should tend our freedom wisely."
"Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favor and esteem for his valor, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished, and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: “Yourself, sir,” replied the other, “by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of my life."
"The natural heat, say the good-fellows,first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middleregion, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress."
"Is it that we pretend to a reformation? Truly, no: but it may be we are more addicted to Venus than our fathers were. They are two exercises that thwart and hinder one another in their vigor. Lechery weakens our stomach on the one side; and on the other sobriety renders us more spruce and amorous for the exercise of love."
"He lives happy and master of himself who can say as each day passes on, "I have lived."
"Meditation is a powerful and full study as can effectually taste and employ themselves."
"I have heard Silvius, an excellent physician of Paris, say that lest the digestive faculties of the stomach should grow idle, it were not amiss once a month to rouse them by this excess, and to spur them lest they should grow dull and rusty; and one author tells us that the Persians used to consult about their mostimportant affairs after being well warmed with wine."
"Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.(There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.)"
"Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing."
"I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind."