Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)
Influential French Renaissance writer, generally considered to be the inventor of the personal essay.
If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.
Non pudeat dicere, quod non pudet sentire: "Let no man be ashamed to speak what he is not ashamed to think."
From now on, Montaigne would live for himself rather than for duty.
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.
Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, research is the means of all learning, and ignorance is the end.
There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.
It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.
The world is but a perpetual see-saw.
Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.
The most offensive egotist is he that fears to say "I" and "me." "It will probably rain "—that is dogmatic. "I think it will rain"—that is natural and modest. Montaigne is the most delightful of essayists because so great is his humility that he does not think it important that we see not Montaigne. He so forgets himself that he employs no artifice to make us forget him.
C'est de quoi j'ai le plus de peur que la peur.
He felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary.
The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.
Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.
Montaigne speak of an “Abecedarian” ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it. The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their A-B-C’s, cannot read at all. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books.
The most profound joy has more of gravity than of gaiety in it.
There is no wish more natural than the wish to know.