1,152 Quotes by Michel de Montaigne

Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.

There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

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.

It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.

I listen with attention to the judgment of all men;but so far as I can remember,I have followed none but my own.

Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own.

Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.

Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their youth...fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober.