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Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.

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
Men
Imprinted
Inhumanity
Cruelty
Instinct
Fear
Nature
Kind

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Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he finds himself! not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content and in him alone belief gives itself being and reality
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Nothing else but an insatiate thirst of enjoying a greedily desired object.
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I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that tied them together.
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We feel a kind of bittersweet pricking of malicious delight in contemplating the misfortunes of others.
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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 man should think less of what he eats and more with whom he eats because no food is so satisfying as good company.
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I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other
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He whose mouth is out of taste says the wine is flat.
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There is a huge gulf between the man who follows the conventions and laws of his country and the man who sets out to regiment them and to change them.
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We call comeliness a mischance in the first respect, which belongs principally to the face.
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It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it.
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But the touch or company of any man whatsoever stirreth up their heat, which in their solitude was hushed and quiet, and lay as cinders raked up in ashes.
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We are born to inquire into truth it belongs to a greater to possess it
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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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A man must always study, but he must not always go to school: what a contemptible thing is an old abecedarian!
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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.
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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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It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.
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Habit is a second nature.
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The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.
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