Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)
Influential French Renaissance writer, generally considered to be the inventor of the personal essay.
Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.
How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!
Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet— the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.
The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.
Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.
The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.
La plus grande chose du monde, c'est de savoir ?tre ? soi.
It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.
The sage says that all that is under heaven incurs the same law and the same fate.
A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
Si, avons nous beau monter sur des échasses, car sur des échasses encore faut-il marcher de nos jambes. Et au plus élevé trône du monde, si ne sommes assis que sur notre cul.
The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure.
There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.
Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest.
Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.
What the earliest utopians—Montaigne, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella—understood was that they fought not for a place but for a new set of ideas through which to recognize what would count as Real: Equality, not hierarchical authority. Individual dignity, not slavish subservience. Our preeminent problem is that we recognize the Real in what is most deadly: a culture of duty to legalities that are, finally, cruel and destructive. We need to work inventively—as Christ did, as Thoreau did—in the spirit of disobedience for the purpose of refusing the social order into which we happen to have been born and putting in its place a culture of life-giving things.
L'homme est bien insensé. Il ne saurait forger un ciron, et forge des Dieux ? douzaines.
Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.
The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.