Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)
Influential French Renaissance writer, generally considered to be the inventor of the personal essay.
I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.
Physicians have this advantage: the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures.
A man may be humble through vainglory.
Je veux que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux.
I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.
Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.
As for extraordinary things, all the provision in the world would not suffice.
Si on me presse, continue-t-il, de dire pourquoi je l'aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu'en répondant: parce que c'était lui; parce que c'était moi.
No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
Saying is one thing and doing is another.
The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.
In my opinion, every rich man is a miser.
Few men have been admired by their own households.
Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself.
'Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.
I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.
There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.
It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.