Michel de Montaigne Men Quotations

A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.

We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.

Unless a man feels he has a good enough memory, he should never venture to lie.

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.

Few men have been admired of their familiars.

The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.

If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.

A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, and suchlike accidents; but as to death, we can experience it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it

Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency: a man may very well say a good thing, give a good answer, cite a good sentence, without at all seeing the force of either the one or the other.

No man divulges his revenue, or at least which way it comes in: but every one publishes his acquisitions.

The man who thinks he knows does not yet know what knowing is

The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.

I must use these great men's virtues as a cloak for my weakness.

A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.

We are more solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak.

No man dies before his hour. The time you leave behind was no more yours, than that which was before your birth, and concerneth you no more.

The plague of man is boasting of his knowledge.

In my opinion , every rich man is a miser.

Few men are admired by their servants.

To call out for the hand of the enemy is a rather extreme measure, yet a better one, I think, than to remain in continual fever over an accident that has no remedy. But since all the precautions that a man can take are full of uneasiness and uncertainty, it is better to prepare with fine assurance for the worst that can happen, and derive some consolation from the fact that we are not sure that it will happen.

A man may be humble through vainglory.

A man must either imitate the vicious or hate them.

Man is forming thousands of ridiculous relations between himself and God .

Not because Socrates said so,... I look upon all men as my compatriots.

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.

Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.

No man profiteth but by the loss of others.

A learned man is not learned in all things; but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout, even to ignorance itself.

It is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men and women alive on account of them.

A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey.

A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom.

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.

No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.

The plague of man is the opinion of knowledge. That is why ignorance is so recommended by our religion as a quality suitable to belief and obedience.

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.

The wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can.

It is not a mind, it is not a body that we educate, but it is a man, and we must not make two parts of him.

Wise men have more to learn of fools than fools of wise men.

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere." "To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

Every man carries the entire form of human condition.

Man is quite insane. He wouldn?t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.

A man must become wise at his own expense.

Philosophical discussions habitually make men happy and joyful not frowning and sad.

A man should not so much respect what he eats, as with whom he eats.

Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des loix toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie.(There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.)

He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

L'homme est bien insensé. Il ne saurait forger un ciron, et forge des Dieux à douzaines. Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

Man in sooth is a marvellous, vain, fickle, and unstable subject.

As far as fidelity is concerned, there is no animal in the world as treacherous as man.

Wine is the benevolent god, who gives back gaiety to men and restores youth to the old.

When we see a man with bad shoes, we say it is no wonder, if he is a shoemaker.

Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.

And I loathe people who find it harder to put up with a gown askew than with a soul askew and who judge a man by his bow, his bearing and his boots.

'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.

Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not.

Every man may speak truly, but to speak methodically, prudently, and fully is a talent that few men have.

The beauty of stature is the only beauty of men.

The corruption of the age is made up by the particular contribution of every individual man; some contribute treachery, others injustice, atheism, tyranny, avarice, cruelty, according to their power.

We cannot be held to what is beyond our strength and means; for at times the accomplishment and execution may not be in our power, and indeed there is nothing really in our own power except the will: on this are necessarily based and founded all the principles that regulate the duty of man.

A man must live in the world and make the best of it, such as it is.

..a man may live long, yet live very little. Satisfaction in life depends not on the number of your years, but on your will.

No man is so exquisitely honest or upright in living, but that ten times in his life he might not lawfully be hanged.

I look upon the too good opinion that man has of himself, as the nursing mother of all false opinions, both public and private.

Men throw themselves on foreign assistances to spare their own, which, after all, are the only certain and sufficient ones.

Men are nothing until they are excited.

God is favorable to those whom he makes to die by degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age. The last death will be so much the less painful: it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most.

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

An ancient father says that a dog we know is better company than a man whose language we do not understand.

What a man hates, he takes seriously.

The general order of things that takes care of fleas and moles also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself.

Some men seem remarkable to the world in whom neither their wives nor their valets saw anything extraordinary. Few men have been admired by their servants.

When all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; his accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never.

Men ... are not agreed about any one thing, not even that heaven is over our heads.

A man must learn to endure patiently what he cannot avoid conveniently.

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

Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in

I consider myself an average man, except in the fact that I consider myself an average man.

We endeavor more that men should speak of us, than how and what they speak, and it sufficeth us that our name run in men's mouths, in what manner soever. It stemma that to be known is in some sort to have life and continuance in other men's keeping.

The worthiest man to be known, and for a pattern to be presented to the world, he is the man of whom we have most certain knowledge. He hath been declared and enlightened by the most clear-seeing men that ever were; the testimonies we have of him are in faithfulness and sufficiency most admirable.

The most unhappy and frail creatures are men and yet they are the proudest.

It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.

How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!

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.

No man is a hero to his own valet.

There are few men who dare to publish to the world the prayers they make to Almighty God.

Lying is a terrible vice, it testifies that one despises God, but fears men.

No two men ever judged alike of the same thing, and it is impossible to find two opinions exactly similar, not only in different men but in the same men at different times.

The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man persuades another man to believe.

We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?

Necessity reconciles and brings men together; and this accidental connection afterward forms itself into laws.

A man must always study, but he must not always go to school: what a contemptible thing is an old abecedarian!

Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like silkworms, and is suffocated in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel...thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered.

Laws are often made by fools, and even more often by men who fail in equity because they hate equality: but always by men, vain authorities who can resolve nothing.

I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.