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Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly.
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
Folly
Wisdom
Happiness
Less
Need
Needs
Excesses
Moderation
Excess
More quotes by Michel de Montaigne
Getting married is very much like going to a restaurant with friends. You order what you want then when you see what the other person has, you wish you had ordered that.
Michel de Montaigne
My errors are by now natural and incorrigible but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.
Michel de Montaigne
Health is a precious thing, and the only one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out not only his time, sweat, labor and goods, but also life itself to obtain it.
Michel de Montaigne
We have no participation in Being, because all human nature is ever midway between being born and dying, giving off only a vague image and shadow of itself, and a weak and uncertain opinion. And if you chance to fix your thoughts on trying to grasp its essence, it would be neither more nor less than if your tried to clutch water.
Michel de Montaigne
Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end.
Michel de Montaigne
The daughter-in-law of Pythagoras said that a woman who goes to bed with a man ought to lay aside her modesty with her skirt, and put it on again with her petticoat
Michel de Montaigne
The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge.
Michel de Montaigne
Greatness of soul consists not so much in soaring high and in pressing forward, as in knowing how to adapt and limit oneself.
Michel de Montaigne
No pleasure is fully delightful without communications, and no delight absolute except imparted.
Michel de Montaigne
The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts, and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.
Michel de Montaigne
I am disgusted with innovation, in whatever guise, and with reason, for I have seen very harmful effects of it.
Michel de Montaigne
It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.
Michel de Montaigne
Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to choose-Experiment has no fewer.
Michel de Montaigne
Learning is a good medicine: but no medicine is powerful enough to preserve itself from taint and corruption independently of defects in the jar that it is kept in. One man sees clearly but does not see straight: consequently he sees what is good but fails to follow it he sees knowledge and does not use it.
Michel de Montaigne
I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden.
Michel de Montaigne
To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct.
Michel de Montaigne
Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.
Michel de Montaigne
Age imprints more wrinkles a in the mind, than it does in the face, and souls are never, or very rarely seen, that in growing old do not smell sour and musty. Man moves all together, both towards his perfection and decay.
Michel de Montaigne
We call comeliness a mischance in the first respect, which belongs principally to the face.
Michel de Montaigne
We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say?
Michel de Montaigne