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Some make the world believe that they believe what they do not believe. Others, in greater number, make themselves believe it, being unable to penetrate what it means to believe.
-Michel de Montaigne, from An Apology to Raymond Sebond, also known as Chapter 12, Book 2 of his Complete Works
If we held to God by the mediation of a living faith, if we held to God through him and not through ourselves, if we had a divine foothold and foundation, human accidents would not have the power to shake us as they do.
-Michel de Montaigne, from An Apology to Raymond Sebond, also known as Chapter 12, Book 2 of his Complete Works
I should certainly like to have a more perfect knowledge of things, but I do not want to buy it as dear as it costs. My intention is to pass pleasantly, and not laboriously, what life I have left. There is nothing for which I want to rack my brain, not even knowledge, however great its value.
I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 10
We must deny that there is any appropriate time for an inappropriate action.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 8
Since it has pleased God to give us some capacity for reason, so that we should not be, like the animals, slavishly subjected to the common laws, but should apply ourselves to them by judgment and voluntary liberty, we must indeed yield a little to the simple authority of Nature, but not let ourselves be carried away tyrannically by her: reason alone must guide our inclinations.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 8
If anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot.
-Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, Book 2, Essay 6
My trade and my art is living.
-Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, Book 2, Essay 6
Many things seem to us greater in imagination than in reality.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 6
Traveling one day—my brother the sieur de la Brousse and I—during our civil wars, we met a gentleman of good appearance. He was of the opposing party, but I knew nothing of it, for he pretended otherwise; and the worst of these wars is that the cards are so shuffled that your enemy is distinguished from yourself by no apparent mark either of language or of bearing, and has been brought up in the same laws and customs and the same atmosphere, so that it is hard to avoid confusion and disorder.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 2, Chapter 5
Time, and the work of changing days, has made
Many a bad thing good; fortune has played
With many men, and set them firm again.
-Virgil, as channeled by Montaigne, Book 2, Chapter 3
To no purpose does the man avoid war who cannot enjoy peace, and to no purpose does the man flee from trouble who does not have what it takes to relish repose.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 2, Chapter 3
A man advanced in dignity and age counted drink among the three principal comforts that he used to say he had left in life. But he took it in the wrong way. Fastidiousness is to be avoided in it, and careful selection of wines. If you make your pleasure depend on drinking good wine, you condemn yourself to the pain of sometimes drinking bad wine. We must have a less exacting and freer taste. To be a good drinker, one must not have so delicate a palate. The Germans drink almost all wines with equal pleasure. Their aims is to swallow rather than to taste. They have much the better of the bargain. Their pleasure is much more plentiful and ready at hand.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 2
A man who does not have a picture of the whole in his head cannot possibly arrange the pieces.
Although I am always minded to say good of what is good, and inclined to interpret favorably anything that can be so interpreted, still it is true that the strangeness of our condition makes it happen that we are often driven to good by vice itself—were it not that doing good is judged by intention alone.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 2, Chapter 1
An annoying malady, to think yourself so wise that you persuade yourself that no one can believe the contrary!
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book One, Chapter 56
It is a marvelous testimony of the weakness of our judgment that it recommends things for their rarity or novelty, or even for their difficulty, even if they are neither good nor useful.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter54
Our appetite is irresolute and uncertain: it does not know how to keep anything or enjoy anything in the right way. Man, thinking that it is the fault of these things, fills and feeds himself on other things that he does not know and does not understand, to which he applies his desires and his hopes, and which he holds in honor and reverence; as Caesar says, 'it happens by a common vice of nature that we trust more, and fear more violently, things to us unseen, hidden, and unknown'.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 53
If we sometimes spent a little consideration on ourselves, and employed in probing ourselves the time we put into checking up on others and learning about things that are outside us, we would easily sense how much this fabric of ours is built up of feeble and failing pieces. It is not singular evidence of our imperfection that we cannot establish our contentment in any one thing, and that even in desire and imagination it is beyond our power to choose what we need?
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 53
If we sometimes spent a little consideration on ourselves, and employed in probing ourselves the time we put into checking up on others and learning about things that are outside us, we would easily sense how much this fabric of ours is built up of feeble and failing pieces. Is it not a singular evidence of our imperfection that we cannot establish our contentment in any one thing, and that even in desire and imagination it is beyond our power to choose what we need? A good proof of this is the great dispute that has always gone on between the philosophers over the sovereign good of man, and that still goes on and will go on eternally, without solution and without agreement:
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 53
A rhetorician of times past said that his trade was to make little things appear and be thought great. That's a shoemaker who can make big shoes for a small foot. They would have had him whipped in Sparta for professing a deceitful and lying art. And I believe that Archidamuus, who was king of Sparta, did not hear without astonishment the answer of Thucydides when he asked him who was better in wrestling, Pericles or he: "That," he said, "would be hard to establish; for when I have thrown him in wrestling, he persuades those who saw it happen that he did not fall, and he wins the prize."
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 51
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