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Men are nothing until they are excited.

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
Excited
Nothing

More quotes by Michel de Montaigne

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I love those historians that are either very simple or most excellent. Such as are between both (which is the most common fashion), it is they that spoil all they will needs chew our meat for us and take upon them a law to judge, and by consequence to square and incline the story according to their fantasy.
Michel de Montaigne
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Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!
Michel de Montaigne
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There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees which are falsehoods on the other
Michel de Montaigne
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Whoever will imagine a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgment without leaning or inclination, on any occasion whatever, hasa conception of Pyrrhonism.
Michel de Montaigne
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He that first likened glory to a shadow did better than he was aware of. They are both of them things excellently vain. Glory also, like a shadow, goes sometimes before the body, and sometimes in length infinitely exceeds it.
Michel de Montaigne
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In the examples that I here bring in of what I have [read], heard, done or said, I have refrained from daring to alter even the smallest and most indifferent circumstances. My conscience falsifies not an iota for my knowledge I cannot answer.
Michel de Montaigne
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The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.
Michel de Montaigne
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Meditation is a rich and powerful method of study for anyone who knows how to examine his mind.
Michel de Montaigne
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There is nothing so noble and so right as to play our human life well and fitly, nor anything so difficult to learn as how to livethis life well and according to Nature.
Michel de Montaigne
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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
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I honor most those to whom I show least honor and where my soul moves with great alacrity, I forget the proper steps of ceremony.
Michel de Montaigne
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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
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There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
Michel de Montaigne
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Travelling through the world produces a marvellous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose.
Michel de Montaigne
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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.
Michel de Montaigne
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The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion-the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt-both with the common motion and with their own.
Michel de Montaigne
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Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all.... All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.
Michel de Montaigne
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I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.
Michel de Montaigne
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I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
Michel de Montaigne
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Beauty is the true prerogative of women, and so peculiarly their own, that our sex, though naturally requiring another sort of feature, is never in its lustre but when puerile and beardless, confused and mixed with theirs.
Michel de Montaigne