1,152 Quotes by Michel de Montaigne

Tis my humor as much to regard the form as the substance, and the advocate as much as the cause, as Alcibiades ordered we should: and every day pass away my time in reading authors without any consideration of their learning; their manner is what I look after, not their subject. And just so do I hunt after the conversation of any eminent wit, not that he may teach me, but that I may know him, and that knowing him, if I think him worthy of imitation, I may imitate him.

Let what I here set down meet with correction or applause, it shall be of equal welcome and utility to me [...]And yet, always submitting to the authority of theircensure, which has an absolute power over me, I thus rashly venture at everything.

Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience.

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.

Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener.

In my country, and in my time, learning improves fortunes enough, but not minds; if it meet with those that are dull and heavy, it overcharges and suffocates them, leaving them a crude and undigested mass; if airy and fine, it purifies, clarifies, and subtilizes them, even to exinanition.

We take other men's knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make it our own. We are in this way much like him, who having need of fire, goes to a neighbour's house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sits down to warm without remembering to carry any with him home.

Moreover, vulgar and casual opinions are something more than nothing in nature; and he who will not suffer himself to proceed so far, falls, peradventure, into the vice of obstinacy, to avoid that of superstition.

Kun je ook maar iemand goed vinden als je niemand slecht vindt?