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If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.

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
Taken
Known
Persons
Person
Compose
Book
Empires
Done
Deal
Great
Deals
Life
Cities

More quotes by Michel de Montaigne

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Things are not bad in themselves, but our cowardice makes them so.
Michel de Montaigne
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I must use these great men's virtues as a cloak for my weakness.
Michel de Montaigne
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Thus we should beware of clinging to vulgar opinions, and judge things by reason's way, not by popular say.
Michel de Montaigne
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The knowledge of courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study. It is like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first sight.
Michel de Montaigne
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Wise people are foolish if they cannot adapt to foolish people.
Michel de Montaigne
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It is for little souls, that truckle under the weight of affairs, not to know how clearly to disengage themselves, and not to know how to lay them aside and take them up again.
Michel de Montaigne
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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.
Michel de Montaigne
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The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.
Michel de Montaigne
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Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves by railing at it and yet it is not absolutely railing against anything, to proclaim its defects, because they are in all things to be found, how beautiful or how much to be coveted soever.
Michel de Montaigne
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There is a certain consideration, and a general duty of humanity, that binds us not only to the animals, which have life and feeling, but even to the trees and plants. We owe justice to people, and kindness and benevolence to all other creatures who may be susceptible of it. There is some intercourse between them and us, and some mutual obligation.
Michel de Montaigne
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The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.
Michel de Montaigne
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Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, ... hit on a body and face so ugly and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty.
Michel de Montaigne
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We call comeliness a mischance in the first respect, which belongs principally to the face.
Michel de Montaigne
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The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.
Michel de Montaigne
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We are born to inquire into truth it belongs to a greater to possess it
Michel de Montaigne
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Every day I hear stupid people say things that are not stupid.
Michel de Montaigne
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Socrates and then Archesilaus used to make their pupils speak first they spoke afterwards. 'Obest plerumque iss discere volunt authoritas eorum qui docent.' [For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be the authority of those who teach]
Michel de Montaigne
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Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.
Michel de Montaigne
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Who ever saw a doctor use the prescription of his colleague without cutting out or adding something?
Michel de Montaigne
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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