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I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.

Michel de Montaigne

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Michel de Montaigne
Age: 59 †
Born: 1533
Born: February 28
Died: 1592
Died: September 13
Autobiographer
Essayist
French Moralist
Jurist
Philosopher
Poet Lawyer
Politician
Translator
Writer
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Miquèu Eiquèm de Montanha
Miqueu Eiquem de Montanha
Understanding
Grasp
Eye
Catch
Everything
Curiosity
Nothing
Except
Bigger
Afraid
Wind
Eyes
Stomachs

More quotes by Michel de Montaigne

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Intoxication is calculated to put heart into the elderly and give them delight in dancing.
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Every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be.
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Examples teach us that in military affairs, and all others of a like nature, study is apt to enervate and relax the courage of man, rather than to give strength and energy to the mind.
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It is the part of cowardice, not of courage, to go and crouch in a hole under a massive tomb, to avoid the blows of fortune.
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'As a man who knows how to make his education into a rule of life not a means of showing off who can control himself and obey his own principles.' The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives.
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If health and a fair day smile upon me, I am a very good fellow if a corn trouble my toe, I am sullen, out of humor, and inaccessible.
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If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.
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Our skin is provided as adequately as theirs with endurance against the assaults of the weather: witness so many nations who have not yet tried the use of any clothes. Our ancient Gauls wore hardly any clothes nor do the Irish, our neighbors, under so cold a sky.
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Once you have decided to keep a certain pile, it is no longer yours for you can't spend it.
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A wellborn mind that is practiced in dealing with people makes itself thoroughly agreeable by itself. Art is nothing else but thelist and record of the productions of such minds.
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I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.
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I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more willfully obstinate.
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The oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried.
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My home...It is my retreat and resting place from wars, I try to keep this corner as a haven against the tempest outside, as I do another corner in my soul.
Michel de Montaigne
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Some impose upon the world that they believe that which they do not others, more in number, make themselves believe that they believe, not being able to penetrate into what it is to believe.
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Necessity is a violent school-mistress.
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Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.
Michel de Montaigne
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He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met to be the sea and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.
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There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.
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Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?
Michel de Montaigne