The Complete Essays Quotes

“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
― Montaigne, Les Essais

“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”
― Michel de Montaigne , The Complete Essays

“If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“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.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.”
― Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Essays

“I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Combien de choses nous servoyent hier d’articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd’huy?

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Essays

“The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be explained by replying: 'Because it was he; because it was me.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Every movement reveals us.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“No wind favors he who has no destined port.”
― Michel de Montaigne , The Complete Essays

“No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Other people do not see you at all, but guess at you by uncertain conjectures.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Why do people respect the package rather than the man?”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“There is no desire more natural than the desire of knowledge. (Il n'est desir plus naturel que le desir de connaissance)”
― Michel de Montaigne, Essays

“It is a disaster that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and always sends you away dissatisfied and fearful, whereas stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy and assurance.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“The thing I fear most is fear.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays