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Is it reasonable that even the arts should take advantage of and profit by our natural stupidity and feebleness of mind?

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
Even
Stupidity
Mind
Reasonable
Arts
Profit
Advantage
Natural
Art
Take
Feebleness

More quotes by Michel de Montaigne

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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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The clatter of arms drowns out the voice of law.
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So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation.
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People of our time are so formed for agitation and ostentation that goodness, moderation, equability, constancy, and such quiet and obscure qualities are no longer felt.
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Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.
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He who does not live in some degree for others, hardly lives for himself.
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Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil.
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Words repeated again have as another sound, so another sense.
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Glory consists of two parts: the one in setting too great a value upon ourselves, and the other in setting too little a value upon others.
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I have seen people rude by being over-polite.
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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.
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Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it.
Michel de Montaigne
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A wise man loses nothing, if he but save himself.
Michel de Montaigne
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Eloquence is an engine invented to manage and wield at will the fierce democracy, and, like medicine to the sick, is only employed in the paroxysms of a disordered state.
Michel de Montaigne
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The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.
Michel de Montaigne
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We find ourselves more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile simplicities of our children, than we do, afterward, with their most complete actions as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men.
Michel de Montaigne
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Love to his soul gave eyes he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life the world around him is the dream.
Michel de Montaigne
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The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.
Michel de Montaigne
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The world is but a perpetual see-saw.
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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.
Michel de Montaigne