To what point of presumption and insolence do we carry our blindness and our foolishness?
1580
Source: Essays
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne (28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592) was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre.
The human understanding loses itself in trying to sound and control all things to the very end.
1580
Source: Essays
He who does not understand himself, in what can he understand?
1580
Source: Essays
Protagoras told us a fine tale, making man the measure of all things, who never even knew his own.
1580
Source: Essays
It is great recklessness to destroy yourself in order to destroy another.
1580
Source: Essays
I advise you [...] moderation and temperance, and the avoidance of novelty and strangeness. All extravagant ways vex me.
1580
Source: Essays
Our mind is a wandering, dangerous, and rash tool: it is difficult to apply order and measure to it.
1580
Source: Essays
The mind is an outrageous sword to its own possessor, for one who does not know how to arm himself with it in an orderly and discreet manner.
1580
Source: Essays
It is difficult to set limits to our mind: it is curious and greedy, and has no more reason to stop at a thousand paces than at fifty.
1580
Source: Essays
How many times do we change our fancies? What I hold today and what I believe, I hold and believe with all my belief [...]. But has it not happened to me [...] to have embraced something else [...] that I have since judged to be false?
1580
Source: Essays
I always call reason that appearance of discourse which everyone forges in himself: this reason [...] is an instrument of lead and wax, stretchable, pliable, and adaptable to all biases and all measures.
1580
Source: Essays
Our waking is more asleep than sleep itself; our wisdom, less wise than folly. Our dreams are worth more than our discourses.
1580
Source: Essays
Since I am not capable of choosing, I take the choice of others and keep myself in the station where God has placed me. Otherwise, I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly.
1580
Source: Essays
Laws derive their authority from possession and usage; it is dangerous to trace them back to their birth.
1580
Source: Essays
What truth is it that is bounded by these mountains, and is a lie to the world that lives beyond them?
1580
Source: Essays
Doctors say that thumbs are the master fingers of the hand.
1580
Source: Essays
The Greeks call it ἀντίχειρ, as if to say, another hand.
1580
Source: Essays
In Rome, it was a sign of favour to [...] lower the thumbs: and of disfavour to raise and turn them outwards.
1580
Source: Essays
The Romans exempted from war those who were injured in the thumb, as if they no longer had a firm enough grip on their weapons.
1580
Source: Essays
Augustus confiscated the property of a Roman Knight who had maliciously cut off the thumbs of his two young children to excuse them from going to the armies.
1580
Source: Essays
The Senate [...] condemned Caius Vatienus to life imprisonment [...] for having deliberately cut off his left thumb to exempt himself from that journey.
1580
Source: Essays
Someone [...] having won a naval battle, had the thumbs of his vanquished enemies cut off to take away their means of fighting and rowing.
1580
Source: Essays
The Athenians had the thumbs of the Aeginetans cut off to take away their superiority in the art of seamanship.
1580
Source: Essays
In Lacedaemon, the schoolmaster would punish children by biting their thumbs.
1580
Source: Essays
Among certain barbarian kings, to make a binding obligation, their custom was to [...] interlace their thumbs [...] wound them with a slight prick, and then suck the blood from one another's.
1580
Source: Essays
Here I have become a grammarian, I who have never learned a language except by routine [...].
1580
Source: Essays
When I am on horseback, I do not willingly dismount; for it is the mode of transport I prefer, whether I am well or ill.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] the essential difference between free men and serfs was that the former went on horseback and the latter on foot.
1580
Source: Essays
When you fight on horseback, you bind your valor and your fortune to that of your horse.
1580
Source: Essays
Victory was then much more contested, whereas now the rout is immediate: the first cries and the first charge decide the success.
1580
Source: Essays
I would advise the use of the shortest possible [...] weapons, as they are the ones whose effects depend most on us.
1580
Source: Essays
One is more certain of the blow one delivers oneself than of that which is sent through the air.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] I believe [firearms] are of little effectiveness and I hope that one day their use will be abandoned.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] furious at perishing from a mere sting, they roll on the ground in rage and shame.
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing, in their eyes, less honorable and so effeminate as to use saddles [...], and they despise those who resort to them.
1580
Source: Essays
The peoples of the New Indies imagined [...] that men and horses were gods, or at least beings of a nature superior to their own.
1580
Source: Essays
To say of someone among us that he is a good horseman is to allude to his boldness more than to his skill.
1580
Source: Essays
The Scythians, when necessity in war obliged them, would bleed their horses and feed upon their blood.
1580
Source: Essays
The first cries and the first charge decide the success.
1580
Source: Essays
Custom is, in truth, a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. [...] she uncovers for us a furious and tyrannical face, against which we no longer have the liberty to even raise our eyes.
1580
Source: Essays
Our greatest vices take their bent from our most tender infancy, and our principal government is in the hands of our nurses.
1580
Source: Essays
Children's games are not games, and they must be judged as their most serious actions.
1580
Source: Essays
No fantasy so mad can fall into the human imagination that does not meet with the example of some public custom [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Miracles are in proportion to our ignorance of nature, not in proportion to the being of nature. Habituation puts the eye of our judgment to sleep.
1580
Source: Essays
Human reason is a tincture infused in about equal measure into all our opinions and customs, whatever their form: infinite in substance, infinite in diversity.
1580
Source: Essays
The laws of conscience, which we say are born of nature, are born of custom.
1580
Source: Essays
What is outside the hinges of custom, is believed to be outside the hinges of reason: God knows how unreasonably, most of the time.
1580
Source: Essays
The wise man ought to withdraw his soul from the crowd, and keep it in the liberty and power to judge things freely; but, as for the outside, he ought entirely to follow the received fashions and forms.
1580
Source: Essays
There is great doubt whether there can be found such evident profit in changing a received law, whatever it may be, as there is evil in stirring it [...].
1580
Source: Essays
I am disgusted with novelty, whatever face it wears, and I have reason, for I have seen very harmful effects from it.
1580
Source: Essays
Those who set a state in motion are often the first to be absorbed in its ruin. The fruit of the trouble seldom remains with the one who stirred it up.
1580
Source: Essays
It is great self-love and presumption to esteem one's opinions so highly that, to establish them, one must overthrow a public peace and introduce so many inevitable evils [...].
1580
Source: Essays
He who meddles with choosing and changing usurps the authority to judge, and must be sure that he sees the fault in what he drives out, and the good in what he introduces.
1580
Source: Essays
Private reason has only a private jurisdiction.
1580
Source: Essays
To whoever would ask me what matters most in love, I would answer that it is first of all to know how to seize the opportune moment; secondly that again, and thirdly always that.
1580
Source: Essays
It is folly to want to shed light on an ill for which there is no treatment that does not increase and worsen it [...].
1580
Source: Essays
For a marriage to be good, the wife must be blind and the husband deaf.
1580
Source: Essays
What do people joke about more, these days, if not a peaceful and well-matched household?
1580
Source: Essays
When I see this bold way of expressing oneself, so lively, so profound, I don't say it is 'well said,' I say it is 'well thought'.
1580
Source: Essays
It is the boldness of the imagination that elevates and gives weight to words.
1580
Source: Essays
[My work], made elsewhere, would have been better, but it would have been less mine; and its main purpose, like its merit, is to be exactly me.
1580
Source: Essays
What vexes me is that my soul usually abandons itself to its deepest reveries, [...] unexpectedly, when I least seek them, and they vanish suddenly, because I have nothing at hand to fix them [...].
1580
Source: Essays
I believe Plato is right when he says that man was created by the gods to serve as their plaything.
1580
Source: Essays
We hide [...] to build a man, to destroy him we seek broad daylight and vast expanses.
1580
Source: Essays
We are ingenious only in mistreating ourselves; it is to this above all that we apply all the resources of our mind, which is a very dangerous instrument of disorder.
1580
Source: Essays
Alas, poor man! You have enough discomforts you are forced to endure, without increasing them further with your inventions!
1580
Source: Essays
He who says everything, sickens and disgusts us. He who, on the contrary, is careful in his expression, leads us to think more than there is.
1580
Source: Essays
Love among the Spanish and Italians, more respectful, more timid, [...] pleases me. [...] To heighten these sensations, one must prolong the preambles.
1580
Source: Essays
I say that males and females come from the same mold and that, except for their education and customs, the difference is not great.
1580
Source: Essays
I propose shapeless and unresolved fantasies [...] not to establish truth, but to seek it.
1580
Source: Essays
[Divine] justice and power are inseparable: in vain do we implore their strength in a bad cause.
1580
Source: Essays
One's soul must be clear [...] and free of vicious passions; otherwise we ourselves present the rods with which to chastise ourselves.
1580
Source: Essays
I do not readily praise those whom I see pray [...] if the actions surrounding the prayer do not attest to some amendment and reformation.
1580
Source: Essays
What prodigious conscience can be at rest, harboring in the same dwelling [...] the crime and the judge?
1580
Source: Essays
It is not in passing, and tumultuously, that one must handle so serious and venerable a study.
1580
Source: Essays
Pure ignorance [...] was far more salutary and wise than this verbal and vain knowledge, the nurse of presumption and temerity.
1580
Source: Essays
Zeal [...] changes into hatred and envy [...] when it is led by a human passion.
1580
Source: Essays
I propose my human and my own fantasies, simply as human fantasies [...] a matter of opinion, not a matter of faith.
1580
Source: Essays
We invoke God and his aid in the conspiracy of our faults, and invite him to injustice.
1580
Source: Essays
There are few men who would dare to bring to light the secret requests they make to God.
1580
Source: Essays
We must not ask that all things follow our will, but that they follow prudence.
1580
Source: Essays
We pray by use and by custom [...]. In the end, it is but show.
1580
Source: Essays
This fault is more often seen, that theologians write too humanly, than the other, that humanists write too little theologically.
1580
Source: Essays
A true prayer [...] cannot fall into an impure soul which is at that very moment subject to the domination of Satan.
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing to which nature seems to have guided us more than to society.
1580
Source: Essays
Good legislators have cared more for friendship than for justice.
1580
Source: Essays
Friendship is nourished by communication, which cannot be found between [fathers and children] because of the too great disparity.
1580
Source: Essays
Our free will has no production more properly its own than that of affection and friendship.
1580
Source: Essays
What we ordinarily call friends and friendships are but acquaintances and familiarities knotted by some occasion or convenience.
1580
Source: Essays
In the friendship of which I speak, [souls] mingle and blend into one another, in so universal a mixture, that they efface and can no longer find the seam which joined them.
1580
Source: Essays
If I am pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by answering: 'Because it was he, because it was I.'
1580
Source: Essays
It is not in the power of all the speeches in the world to dislodge me from the certainty I have of the intentions and judgments of my [friend].
1580
Source: Essays
In these other friendships one must walk with the bridle in hand, with prudence and precaution; the bond is not so tied that one has no cause to be wary of it.
1580
Source: Essays
Regarding ordinary and customary [friendships], one must use the saying that was very familiar to Aristotle: 'O my friends! There is no friend.'
1580
Source: Essays
The union of such friends being truly perfect, it makes them lose the sense of such duties, and to hate and banish from among them those words of division and difference.
1580
Source: Essays
[Their] accord being but one soul in two bodies, according to the very proper definition of Aristotle, they can neither lend nor give anything to each other.
1580
Source: Essays
This perfect friendship I speak of is indivisible: each one gives himself so entirely to his friend that he has nothing left to distribute elsewhere.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a great enough miracle to be doubled; and those who speak of being tripled do not know its height.
1580
Source: Essays
Since the day I lost him, [...] I do nothing but drag on languishing; and the very pleasures that offer themselves to me, instead of consoling me, redouble my regret for his loss.
1580
Source: Essays
Almost all our opinions are formed only by the authority of others [...]. These have our approval only out of respect for universal approval.
1580
Source: Essays
In matters of grace, we only perceive those that are piquant [...] and overflowing with artifice; those that glide by, naive and simple, easily escape senses as coarse as ours.
1580
Source: Essays
Our world is kneaded with ostentation; men inflate themselves only with wind and move in leaps, like balloons.
1580
Source: Essays
We are each of us richer than we think; but we are trained to borrow and to beg; we are shaped to make use of others more than of ourselves.
1580
Source: Essays
Man knows not how to stop in anything [...]. Whether it be pleasure, wealth, or power, he embraces more than he can grasp; his greed is incapable of moderation.
1580
Source: Essays
True freedom consists in having, in all things, power over oneself.
1580
Source: Essays
Is there anything so bad in a government that is worth being fought with a drug as deadly as civil war?
1580
Source: Essays
One cannot imagine a worse state of affairs than that in which wickedness has become legitimate and dons [...] the cloak of virtue.
1580
Source: Essays
I usually aid the injurious presumptions that fortune sows against me, by the way I have always had of avoiding justifying, excusing, and explaining myself.
1580
Source: Essays
In all things, man resorts to the support of others to spare himself from resorting to that which is within him, [...] the only one on which he can rely.
1580
Source: Essays
We trouble life with the care of death, and death with the care of life; the one vexes us, the other frightens us.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not against death that we prepare ourselves, it is too momentary a thing [...]. To tell the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations for death.
1580
Source: Essays
If you do not know how to die, do not trouble yourself: nature will inform you on the spot, fully and sufficiently; she will do that work for you perfectly.
1580
Source: Essays
Maturity has its faults just like what is still green, they are even worse; as for old age, it is as unsuited for this work as for any other.
1580
Source: Essays
I have not, like Socrates, corrected my natural instincts by the power of reason [...]; I let myself go as I came, I fight nothing.
1580
Source: Essays
It is [...] that we get this fantasy, that human reason is the general controller of all that is outside and inside the celestial vault, which embraces all, which can do all.
1580
Source: Essays
The extremities of our inquiry all fall into bewilderment. [...] The end and the beginning of knowledge are held in similar foolishness.
1580
Source: Essays
Whoever would bundle up a sufficient heap of the asinities of human wisdom, would tell wonders.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no human judgment, so strained, that does not slumber at times.
1580
Source: Essays
The human imagination can conceive of nothing, good or evil, that is not [found in philosophy]: Nothing so absurd can be said that has not been said by some philosopher.
1580
Source: Essays
All things produced by our own discourse and sufficiency, the true as well as the false, are subject to uncertainty and debate.
1580
Source: Essays
Who could hold us back, if we had but a grain of knowledge?
1580
Source: Essays
Truth must have a single and universal face. [...] Righteousness and justice, if man knew them, [...] he would not attach them to the conditions of the customs of this or that country.
1580
Source: Essays
What kind of truth is it that is bounded by these mountains, and is a lie to the world beyond?
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing subject to more continual agitation than the laws.
1580
Source: Essays
Our mind is a vagabond, dangerous, and reckless tool: it is difficult to apply order and measure to it.
1580
Source: Essays
How differently we judge of things? How many times do we change our fancies?
1580
Source: Essays
Whatever is preached to us, whatever we learn, we should always remember that it is man who gives, and man who receives; it is a mortal hand that presents it to us; it is a mortal hand that accepts it.
1580
Source: Essays
I always call reason that appearance of discourse that each forges in himself: that reason [...] of which there can be a hundred contraries on the same subject.
1580
Source: Essays
One must not believe everyone, says the precept, because everyone can say everything.
1580
Source: Essays
Fear is the strangest of all passions.
1580
Source: Essays
I have seen many people driven mad by fear; even in the most level-headed, [...] it causes terrible disturbances of the mind.
1580
Source: Essays
How many times has [fear] not transformed in their eyes a flock of sheep into a squadron of pikemen [...]?
1580
Source: Essays
Fear sometimes gives us wings on our heels, [...] other times it nails us to the ground and immobilizes us.
1580
Source: Essays
...so much does fear dread even that which could come to its aid.
1580
Source: Essays
It is especially when, under its influence, we recover the valor it has taken from us [...] that fear shows its most intensive action.
1580
Source: Essays
[Some] purchase a shameful flight at the cost of the same efforts that would have been required to win a glorious victory.
1580
Source: Essays
The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear.
1580
Source: Essays
[Fear], through the acute incidents it causes us, surpasses every other kind of accident.
1580
Source: Essays
Fear, stronger than their grief, had paralyzed [their tears].
1580
Source: Essays
Those who have known great fear of the enemy, you could not even make them look him in the face.
1580
Source: Essays
Those who have serious reason to fear [...] live in a state of continuous anguish; they lose the desire to drink, to eat, and also to rest.
1580
Source: Essays
How many people, hounded by the sharp pangs of fear, have hanged themselves, drowned themselves, or thrown themselves from precipices...
1580
Source: Essays
[Fear] shows us clearly that it is even more troublesome and unbearable than death.
1580
Source: Essays
The Greeks recognize another kind of fear, which does not come from an error of our judgment and arises, they say, without apparent cause [...]. This is what the Greeks call 'panic terrors'.
1580
Source: Essays
It is seen by experience [...] that excellent memories are often joined to weak judgments.
1580
Source: Essays
From a natural flaw, they make a flaw of conscience.
1580
Source: Essays
The storehouse of memory is often more furnished with material than that of invention.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a difficult thing to close a discourse and to cut it off once one is set on a course [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Old men are especially dangerous, for whom the memory of things past remains, while they have lost the memory of their own repetitions.
1580
Source: Essays
[Thanks to my poor memory], I remember received offenses less.
1580
Source: Essays
[Thanks to my poor memory], the places and books I see again always greet me with a fresh novelty.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not without reason that they say he who is not very firm of memory should not make a trade of lying.
1580
Source: Essays
The definition of the word 'to lie' [...] means as much as to go against one's conscience.
1580
Source: Essays
In truth, lying is an accursed vice: we are men and hold to one another only by our word.
1580
Source: Essays
If we knew the horror and weight [of a lie], we would pursue it with fire, more justly than other crimes.
1580
Source: Essays
Lying alone, and a little below it, stubbornness, seem to me to be the vices whose birth and progress we should combat at all costs.
1580
Source: Essays
If, like truth, a lie had but one face, we would be on better terms; for we would take as certain the opposite of what the liar said.
1580
Source: Essays
The reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.
1580
Source: Essays
We are better off in the company of a known dog than in that of a man whose language is unknown to us. And how much less sociable is false language than silence.
1580
Source: Essays
It is common to see good intentions, if not conducted with moderation, push men to very vicious effects.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] passion pushes [men] beyond the bounds of reason, and sometimes makes them adopt unjust, violent, and even reckless counsel.
1580
Source: Essays
I believe that this disorder [religious zeal] has done more harm to literature than all the fires of the barbarians.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] the enmity he bore towards our [religion] gave no counterweight to the scales of justice.
1580
Source: Essays
He owed to philosophy a singular contempt in which he held his life and human affairs.
1580
Source: Essays
He had a firm belief in the eternity of souls.
1580
Source: Essays
[He said he was] worthy of dying in this noble fashion, in the course of his victories and in the flower of his glory.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] he had long cherished paganism in his heart; but because his whole army was of Christians, he dared not reveal it.
1580
Source: Essays
He earnestly admonished them to quell these civil dissensions, and that everyone, without hindrance or fear, should practice their religion.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] having experienced through the cruelty of some Christians that there is no beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man.
1580
Source: Essays
The Emperor Julian uses, to stir up trouble [...], the same recipe of freedom of conscience that our Kings have just used to extinguish it.
1580
Source: Essays
One could say, on one hand, that giving free rein to [factions] to maintain their opinion is to spread and sow division.
1580
Source: Essays
On the other hand, one could also say that giving free rein to [factions] [...] is to soften and relax them through ease and facility [...].
1580
Source: Essays
[Freedom of opinion] is to blunt the sting which is sharpened by rarity, novelty, and difficulty.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] being unable to have what they wanted, they pretended to want what they could.
1580
Source: Essays
This same trickery that the senses bring to our understanding, they in turn receive. Our soul sometimes takes its revenge likewise; they lie and deceive one another.
1580
Source: Essays
The object we love seems more beautiful to us than it is, [...] and the one we dislike, uglier.
1580
Source: Essays
Those who have compared our life to a dream were right, perhaps more so than they thought.
1580
Source: Essays
Our waking is never so awake as to properly purge and dissipate daydreams, which are the dreams of the waking, and worse than dreams.
1580
Source: Essays
Our reason and our soul, receiving the fantasies and opinions that arise during sleep, [...] why do we not question whether our thinking, our acting, is not another dream, and our waking some kind of sleep?
1580
Source: Essays
Finally, there is no constant existence, neither of our being, nor of that of objects. And we, and our judgment, and all mortal things, go on flowing and rolling ceaselessly.
1580
Source: Essays
We have no communication with being, because all human nature is always in the middle ground between being born and dying, giving of itself but an obscure appearance and a shadow [...].
1580
Source: Essays
And then we foolishly fear one kind of death, when we have already passed through and are passing through so many others.
1580
Source: Essays
No good can bring us pleasure, unless it is one for whose loss we are prepared.
1580
Source: Essays
Our appetite despises and passes over what it has in hand, to chase after what it does not have.
1580
Source: Essays
To forbid us something is to make us desire it [...]. To give it up to us entirely is to breed contempt for it.
1580
Source: Essays
We are all hollow and empty: it is not with wind and words that we must fill ourselves; we need more solid substance to repair ourselves.
1580
Source: Essays
Virtue is a very vain and frivolous thing if it draws its recommendation from glory.
1580
Source: Essays
O what a vile [...] and abject thing is man, if he does not raise himself above humanity!
1580
Source: Essays
I do not care so much what I am in the eyes of others, as I care what I am in myself. I want to be rich by my own means, not by borrowing.
1580
Source: Essays
Whatever diversity of herbs there may be, they are all included under the name of salad.
1580
Source: Essays
It is commonly said that there is an advantage to having a good name or a good reputation, that is, credit and standing; it is equally true that it is useful to have a fine name, one that is easy to pronounce and to remember.
1580
Source: Essays
Socrates believes that it is a care to which a father should devote himself to give fine names to his children.
1580
Source: Essays
Just by hearing them pronounced, one felt that these were people quite different from Pierre, Guillot, and Michel!
1580
Source: Essays
It is a bad habit [...] that in France we call everyone by the name of their land and their lordship; it is the thing in the world that most causes families to mix and become indistinguishable.
1580
Source: Essays
Nowadays, I see no one, raised by fortune to however high a rank, for whom new and unknown genealogical titles, ignored by his father, have not immediately been discovered.
1580
Source: Essays
How many gentlemen do we have in France who, by their own account more than by that of others, are of royal blood!
1580
Source: Essays
Let us be content then, by God! with what our fathers were content with and with what we are; our rank is sufficient, if we know how to hold it well.
1580
Source: Essays
Let us banish these ridiculous flights of fancy, which cannot fail to turn to the confusion of anyone who has the impudence to have unfounded pretensions.
1580
Source: Essays
Coats of arms prove little more than surnames.
1580
Source: Essays
For God's sake, let us examine closely and probe upon what this glory, this reputation for which we turn the world upside down, rests?
1580
Source: Essays
What a powerful faculty hope truly is, which, in a mere mortal embracing the infinite, the immense, the eternal, substitutes [...] for absolute indigence the unlimited possession of all that he can imagine and desire.
1580
Source: Essays
But, in the end, what is Pierre or Guillaume but a sound or three or four strokes of a pen [...].
1580
Source: Essays
What prevents my groom from being named Pompey the Great?
1580
Source: Essays
Man is more thirsty for glory than for virtue.
1580
Source: Essays
To make a binding obligation, their manner was to join their right hands tightly to one another, and to interlace their thumbs [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Doctors say that the thumbs are the master fingers of the hand [...].
1580
Source: Essays
The Greeks call it ἀντίχειρ, as if to say another hand.
1580
Source: Essays
In Rome, it was a sign of favor to press down and lower the thumbs [...].
1580
Source: Essays
[...] and of disfavor, to raise and turn them outwards.
1580
Source: Essays
The Romans exempted from war those who were wounded in the thumb, as if they no longer had a firm enough grip on their weapons.
1580
Source: Essays
Augustus confiscated the property of a Roman knight who had, out of malice, cut off the thumbs of his two young children to excuse them from going to war.
1580
Source: Essays
The Senate [...] had condemned Caius Vatienus to perpetual prison and confiscated all his property, for having deliberately cut off his thumb [...] to exempt himself from this [military] journey.
1580
Source: Essays
Someone [...] having won a naval battle, had the thumbs of his vanquished enemies cut off, to take away their means of fighting and rowing.
1580
Source: Essays
The Athenians had them cut off the Aeginetans to take away their superiority in the art of seamanship.
1580
Source: Essays
In Lacedaemon, the master would punish children by biting their thumb.
1580
Source: Essays
It is seen by experience [...] that excellent memories are often joined with weak judgments.
1580
Source: Essays
From a natural defect, they make a defect of conscience.
1580
Source: Essays
Certainly I can easily forget: but to neglect a charge that my friend has given me, that I do not do.
1580
Source: Essays
My speech is the shorter for it: for the storehouse of memory is often more furnished with material than that of invention.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a difficult thing to close a discourse and to cut it off once one is on the way.
1580
Source: Essays
Above all, old men are dangerous, in whom the memory of things past remains, while they have lost the memory of their own repetitions.
1580
Source: Essays
I remember less the offenses received [...] and the places and books I see again always smile upon me with a fresh novelty.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not without reason that they say that he who is not conscious of having a good memory should not take it upon himself to be a liar.
1580
Source: Essays
In truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are but men, and we hold to one another only by our word.
1580
Source: Essays
Lying alone, and a little below it, obstinacy, seem to me to be those things whose birth and progress one should combat at all costs.
1580
Source: Essays
If, like truth, falsehood had only one face, we should be on better terms [...]. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.
1580
Source: Essays
The Pythagoreans make good certain and finite, evil infinite and uncertain. A thousand paths deviate from the target: only one leads to it.
1580
Source: Essays
How much less sociable is false language than silence?
1580
Source: Essays
[...] excellent memories are often joined with weak judgments.
1580
Source: Essays
When they [liars] disguise and change a story, upon having them often retell it, it is difficult for them not to get muddled.
1580
Source: Essays
We waste our time worrying about future things, as if we did not have enough to do with the incidents of daily life.
1580
Source: Essays
Nothing is gained by knowing the future, and it is a misfortune to torment oneself in vain.
1580
Source: Essays
A prudent god has hidden the events of the future in a thick night, and laughs at the mortal who worries about fate more than he should.
1580
Source: Essays
He is master of himself and lives happily who can say each day: 'I have lived'.
1580
Source: Essays
Content with the present, let us beware of worrying about the future.
1580
Source: Essays
As for those who understand the language of birds [...] rather than their own reason, I maintain that it is better to listen to them than to believe them.
1580
Source: Essays
To settle my own affairs, I would rather trust the roll of the dice than the interpretation of dreams.
1580
Source: Essays
By saying so much, it is inevitable that truths and lies should be found together.
1580
Source: Essays
Who is there that, shooting at a target all day long, will not sometimes hit it?
1580
Source: Essays
Since no one takes note of their errors, as they are infinite in number [...], it is easy to promote those of their predictions [...] that happen to come true by chance.
1580
Source: Essays
They show the pictures of those who escaped shipwreck, but those who perished, who are far more numerous, have dedicated none.
1580
Source: Essays
We have seen certain elite minds sometimes fall for these foolish ideas, to their great detriment.
1580
Source: Essays
What gives [prophets] the upper hand is the obscure, ambiguous, and fantastical language of prophetic jargon.
1580
Source: Essays
Everyone sometimes feels within themselves a similar obsession of ideas, which arises suddenly, with force, and without any discernible cause.
1580
Source: Essays
In a [...] pure [...] soul, it is likely that these inspirations, though bold and imprecise, were always of great consequence and deserved to be heard.
1580
Source: Essays
The trade of [a rhetorician] is to make small things appear great.
1580
Source: Essays
Those who mask women do less harm than those who make it their business to deceive not our eyes, but our judgment.
1580
Source: Essays
Socrates and Plato [define rhetoric as an] art of deceiving and flattering.
1580
Source: Essays
[Eloquence] is a tool that is only used in sick States, like medicine.
1580
Source: Essays
Eloquence flourished most when affairs were at their worst, just as a free and untamed field bears the most vigorous weeds.
1580
Source: Essays
The gullibility found in the common people makes them liable to be handled [...] by the ears to the sweet sound of that harmony [of rhetoric].
1580
Source: Essays
It is easier to protect oneself from the impression of this poison [that is eloquence] through good education and sound advice.
1580
Source: Essays
He gave me a discourse on the science of the palate with a magisterial countenance, as if he had been speaking of some great point of theology.
1580
Source: Essays
When I hear our architects puff themselves up with big words [...], I find in comparison that they are but the paltry parts of my kitchen door.
1580
Source: Essays
Metonymy, metaphor, allegory [...]? These are titles that pertain to your chambermaid's chatter.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a deception to call the offices of our State by the superb titles of the Romans, though they have no resemblance in function.
1580
Source: Essays
[It is an error] to apply unworthily [...] the most glorious surnames with which Antiquity honored but one or two persons in several centuries.
1580
Source: Essays
I do not see that there is anything in [him] above the common authors of his century, so far is he from approaching that ancient divinity.
1580
Source: Essays
The surname 'Great,' we attach it to princes who have nothing in them above common greatness.
1580
Source: Essays
I am one of those over whom imagination has great sway. [...] I would gladly spend my life in the company of healthy and cheerful people.
1580
Source: Essays
The sight of others' anguish physically affects me in a painful way, and I have often suffered from feeling another's suffering.
1580
Source: Essays
I become imbued with a disease to which I give my particular attention, and I catch its seed.
1580
Source: Essays
It is likely that the main credit for visions, enchantments, and such extraordinary effects comes from the power of the imagination.
1580
Source: Essays
Their credulity has been so strongly seized that they think they see what they do not see.
1580
Source: Essays
Their inanity gives them weight and reverence.
1580
Source: Essays
The woman who lies down with a man should, along with her skirt, cast off her shame, and put it on again with her skirt.
1580
Source: Essays
One is right to note the untamable liberty of [this body part], intruding so importunely when we have no use for it, and failing so importunely when we have the most need of it.
1580
Source: Essays
I leave you to think whether there is a single part of our body that does not often refuse its operation to our will, and that does not often exert itself against our will.
1580
Source: Essays
Does it [our will] always want what we would like it to want? Does it not often want what we forbid it to want, and to our obvious detriment?
1580
Source: Essays
The discourses are mine, and they stand on the proof of reason, not of experience; everyone can add their own examples.
1580
Source: Essays
Whether it happened or not, in Rome or in Paris, to John or to Peter, it is always a turn of human capacity, of which I am usefully informed by this account.
1580
Source: Essays
In the study of our manners and movements, fabulous testimonies, provided they are possible, serve as well as the true ones.
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing so contrary to my style as a lengthy narrative. I cut myself off so often, for want of breath.
1580
Source: Essays
Why do doctors cultivate their patient's credulity beforehand with so many false promises of his recovery, if not so that the effect of imagination may make up for the imposture of their potion?
1580
Source: Essays
To wish to arrive at absolute certainty is, in a way, a testimony to madness and extreme uncertainty.
1580
Source: Essays
One does not argue with those who deny the principles.
1580
Source: Essays
By what can we better test reason than by itself? If we cannot believe it when it speaks of itself, it is hardly fit to judge that which is not itself.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] human fantasy can no longer conceive of anything, good or bad, that is not in it: 'Nothing so absurd can be said that has not already been said by some philosopher'.
1580
Source: Essays
Man takes extreme care to prolong his being; he has provided for it in every way: for the preservation of his body, through burial; for that of his name, through glory.
1580
Source: Essays
The soul, being unable, due to its turmoil and weakness, to find calm, goes about seeking consolations, hopes, and supports everywhere [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Everything that our reason and our intelligence alone produce, both what is true and what is false, is subject to uncertainty and debate.
1580
Source: Essays
Our mind is a wandering, dangerous, and reckless tool; it is difficult to use it with order and measure.
1580
Source: Essays
The mind is a dangerous sword, even for the one who possesses it, if he does not know how to use it with timeliness and discretion.
1580
Source: Essays
What I accept today and what I believe [...] but has it not happened to me, not once, but a hundred times, a thousand times, and every day, to have embraced [...] something else which I have since judged to be false?
1580
Source: Essays
Whatever is preached to us, whatever we learn, we should always remember that it is man who gives it and man who receives it; it is a mortal's hand that presents it, and a mortal's hand that accepts it.
1580
Source: Essays
Is our mind not sharper, our memory quicker, our reasoning more lively when we are well than when we are sick?
1580
Source: Essays
In whatever good resolution a judge may be, if he does not watch himself closely [...], he may be swayed towards benevolence if a friend, a relative, or a beauty is involved, just as he may be haunted by a desire for vengeance.
1580
Source: Essays
We improve ourselves by the loss of our reason and when it is dormant; the two natural ways to enter the cabinet of the gods [...] are fury and sleep.
1580
Source: Essays
Thus, when a new doctrine is offered to us, we have every reason to be wary of it and to consider that before it came to be, the contrary doctrine prevailed.
1580
Source: Essays
We must not judge what is possible and what is not, according to what seems believable or unbelievable to us.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a great fault [...] into which most men fall, to find it difficult to believe that others can know or want what they themselves do not know or do not want.
1580
Source: Essays
It would seem that each person is the quintessential model of human nature, that all others must conform to him [...].
1580
Source: Essays
It is very difficult to assign a limit to the faculties of the soul, much more so than to the bodily forces [...].
1580
Source: Essays
What we have not seen, we must indeed take from others and accept on credit.
1580
Source: Essays
As for me, I consider certain men [...] to be far superior to me; and, although I clearly recognize my inability to follow them [...], I do not lose sight of them.
1580
Source: Essays
If my own strength does not allow me to imitate them, my judgment at least studies them very willingly.
1580
Source: Essays
Obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigor and firmness.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] the most beautiful, most virtuous actions, in war as elsewhere, are not always the most renowned.
1580
Source: Essays
I often encounter the names of captains who are eclipsed by the splendor of others who are not their equal.
1580
Source: Essays
It is madness to wish to pass a single judgment, encompassing a set of subjects that can be viewed in so many different ways.
1580
Source: Essays
[He] does not take them as a whole, nor does he express any overall preference; he compares [...] certain episodes, certain particulars of their respective lives and judges them separately.
1580
Source: Essays
The faithfulness and sincerity of his judgments equal their depth and value.
1580
Source: Essays
He is a philosopher who teaches us virtue.
1580
Source: Essays
Every craftsman loves the work of which he is the author more than he would be loved by it, if that work were capable of feeling.
1580
Source: Essays
Things are all the dearer to us for having cost us more, and giving is more precious than receiving.
1580
Source: Essays
Reason alone should serve as the rule for our inclinations.
1580
Source: Essays
A sincere and justified affection [...] should be born from the knowledge they give us of themselves and grow with it, so that, if they deserve it, [...] we may come to cherish them with a truly paternal affection.
1580
Source: Essays
It even seems that the jealousy of seeing them cut a fine figure in the world [...] makes us more parsimonious and miserly towards them.
1580
Source: Essays
A father is most unfortunate if the affection [...] his children bear him depends on their need for him.
1580
Source: Essays
It is by virtue and ability that one earns respect, by goodness and gentleness of manners that one makes oneself loved.
1580
Source: Essays
I am opposed to all violence in the education of a young soul that one wishes to train in the cult of honor and liberty. Rigor and constraint have something servile about them.
1580
Source: Essays
The only effect I have observed from the use of the rod is to make souls more cowardly or to make them more obstinate in evil.
1580
Source: Essays
Everything has its time; what does not come at its moment should be set aside.
1580
Source: Essays
It is high time to loosen the reins on your aging horse, lest it [...] become an object of ridicule.
1580
Source: Essays
Even if I could make myself feared, I would still prefer to make myself loved.
1580
Source: Essays
All that touches my neighbor, touches me; any accident that befalls him is a warning to me and calls my attention to it.
1580
Source: Essays
What our soul engenders, what is born of our mind [...] comes from a nobler part of ourselves than our body, and is even more us than our children.
1580
Source: Essays
The wise resolve upon it only once for all, being concerned above all with what reason and the observance of the laws command.
1580
Source: Essays
If we were to spend the time we put into controlling others [...] into sounding our own depths, we would easily feel how our entire fabric is built of weak and failing pieces.
1580
Source: Essays
Is it not a singular testimony of imperfection, to be unable to settle our contentment on any single thing?
1580
Source: Essays
[...] by desire and imagination itself, it is beyond our power to choose what we need.
1580
Source: Essays
The great dispute [...] among the Philosophers to find the sovereign good of man [...] still endures and will endure eternally, without resolution and without agreement.
1580
Source: Essays
Whatever falls into our knowledge and enjoyment, we feel that it does not satisfy us.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] we go gaping after things to come and unknown, because the present things do not sate us.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not that [present things] do not have enough to sate us, but that we grasp them with a sick and disordered grip.
1580
Source: Essays
Our appetite is irresolute and uncertain: it knows not how to hold anything, nor how to enjoy anything properly.
1580
Source: Essays
Man, believing the fault lies in things, fills and feeds himself with other things he does not know.
1580
Source: Essays
[Man] applies his desires and hopes to unknown things, holding them in honor and reverence.
1580
Source: Essays
This whole fabric of ours is built of weak and failing pieces.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a common fault of nature that we have more confidence in [...] things unseen, hidden, and unknown.
1580
Source: Essays
As long as what we crave is absent, it seems to surpass all else; once we have it, we crave something else, and an equal thirst holds us.
1580
Source: Essays
It is the fault of the vessel itself, which causes everything put into it [...] to become corrupted within it.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge.
1580
Source: Essays
Resemblance does not so much make things one, as difference makes them other.
1580
Source: Essays
There is as much freedom and scope in the interpretation of laws as in their making.
1580
Source: Essays
The most desirable [laws] are the rarest, simplest, and most general. [...] it would be better to have none at all than to have them in such numbers as we have.
1580
Source: Essays
There is more to do in interpreting interpretations than in interpreting things: and more books about books than on any other subject. We do nothing but gloss one another.
1580
Source: Essays
Never did two men judge alike of the same thing. And it is impossible to see two opinions exactly alike, not only in different men, but in the same man at different hours.
1580
Source: Essays
Men are ignorant of the natural infirmity of their mind. It does nothing but ferret and quest; and ceaselessly spins, builds, and entangles itself in its own work, like our silkworms, and is smothered in it.
1580
Source: Essays
No generous mind stops within itself. It always aims for and goes beyond its strength.
1580
Source: Essays
I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.
1580
Source: Essays
To commit oneself to Nature most simply is to commit oneself to her most wisely. Oh what a soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, for a well-made head to rest upon.
1580
Source: Essays
The life of Caesar has no more examples for us than our own. [...] it is still a life to which all human accidents are relevant.
1580
Source: Essays
One must learn that one is but a fool. A much more ample and important instruction.
1580
Source: Essays
Affirmation and stubbornness are express signs of stupidity.
1580
Source: Essays
One needs very strong ears to hear oneself frankly judged.
1580
Source: Essays
Now, laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystical foundation of their authority, they have no other.
1580
Source: Essays
We must be wary of clinging to vulgar opinions, and judge things by the way of reason, not by the common voice.
1580
Source: Essays
I fear we have eyes bigger than our bellies, and more curiosity than we have capacity. We embrace everything, but we grasp only wind.
1580
Source: Essays
Everyone calls barbarism what is not his own practice.
1580
Source: Essays
We have no other criterion of truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.
1580
Source: Essays
It is those that we have altered by our artifice, and diverted from the common order, that we should rather call wild.
1580
Source: Essays
We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of [Nature's] works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
1580
Source: Essays
All our efforts cannot even succeed in reproducing the nest of the littlest bird [...] nor even the web of the humble spider.
1580
Source: Essays
I am not sorry that we should notice the barbarous horror of such an action, but I am sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own.
1580
Source: Essays
I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; in tearing by tortures [...] a body still full of feeling [...] than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.
1580
Source: Essays
We may then well call them barbarians, in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.
1580
Source: Essays
The worth and value of a man is in his heart and his will; there lies his real honor.
1580
Source: Essays
Valor is the firmness, not of legs and arms, but of courage and soul.
1580
Source: Essays
He who falls obstinate in his courage [...] is beaten, not by us, but by fortune: he is killed, not conquered.
1580
Source: Essays
The honor of virtue consists in fighting, not in winning.
1580
Source: Essays
They found it strange how these needy 'halves' could endure such an injustice, that they did not take the others by the throat, or set fire to their houses.
1580
Source: Essays
I am one of the most exempt from this passion [sadness], and I neither love nor esteem it, although the world has undertaken [...] to honor it with particular favor.
1580
Source: Essays
They dress up wisdom, virtue, and conscience with it: a foolish and monstrous ornament.
1580
Source: Essays
[Sadness] is a quality always harmful, always foolish, and, as always cowardly and base[...].
1580
Source: Essays
Being already full and overwhelmed with sadness, the slightest additional burden broke the barriers of patience.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] this last sorrow alone can be expressed in tears, the first two far surpassing any means of expression.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] as if no countenance could represent that degree of grief.
1580
Source: Essays
It is that bleak, mute, and deaf stupor that freezes us when events overwhelm us, surpassing our capacity to bear them.
1580
Source: Essays
The force of a grief, to be extreme, must stun the entire soul and impede the freedom of its actions.
1580
Source: Essays
The soul, afterwards relaxing into tears and complaints, seems to unburden itself, to disentangle, and to become more free and at ease.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not in the liveliest and most burning heat of the fit that we are able to deploy our complaints [...]: the soul is then burdened with deep thoughts.
1580
Source: Essays
All passions that can be savored and digested are but mediocre.
1580
Source: Essays
Light sorrows are loquacious, great ones are mute. [Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent.]
1580
Source: Essays
The surprise of an unexpected pleasure stuns us in the same way.
1580
Source: Essays
I am little subject to these violent passions. My apprehension is naturally tough; and I crust it over and thicken it every day through discourse.
1580
Source: Essays
I leave it to the doctors to comment.
1580
Source: Essays
Lest the event should disprove it, it is better to move on.
1580
Source: Essays
It is indeed safer to guess at accomplished facts.
1580
Source: Essays
What we call monsters are not so in the eyes of God, who sees in the immensity of His works the infinity of forms.
1580
Source: Essays
It is to be believed that such a figure which astonishes us relates to some other of the same kind, which is unknown to man.
1580
Source: Essays
Everything that emanates from His infinite wisdom is beautiful and stems from general rules; but the relationship [...] escapes us.
1580
Source: Essays
Man is not astonished by what he often sees, even if he does not know its cause.
1580
Source: Essays
What one has never seen, if it happens, one considers it a prodigy.
1580
Source: Essays
We say of that which differs from what we ordinarily see, that it is contrary to nature.
1580
Source: Essays
Nothing, whatever it may be, exists except according to its [Nature's] laws.
1580
Source: Essays
May this universal and natural reason drive from us the error and astonishment that novelty brings us.
1580
Source: Essays
It is said that he divined backwards.
1580
Source: Essays
No one is exempt from saying foolish things; the mischief is in saying them pretentiously.
1580
Source: Essays
Our being is an agglomeration of qualities which are as many diseases: ambition, jealousy, envy, revenge, superstition, despair...
1580
Source: Essays
In the midst of compassion, we experience within ourselves I know not what bittersweet feeling of unhealthy pleasure at the spectacle of others' suffering.
1580
Source: Essays
In every government there are necessary offices, not only abject but also vicious. Vices find their place there [...], like poisons for the preservation of our health.
1580
Source: Essays
The public good requires that one betray, lie, and massacre: let us resign this commission to more obedient and pliable people.
1580
Source: Essays
Frankness and truth, in whatever century, are still fitting and opportune.
1580
Source: Essays
Anger and hatred have nothing to do with justice; they are passions serving only those who do not hold enough to their duty by simple reason.
1580
Source: Essays
To remain wavering and divided, to keep one's affection motionless and without inclination in the troubles of one's country [...], I find it neither beautiful nor honorable.
1580
Source: Essays
We must not call 'duty', as we do every day, a bitterness and harshness born of our own interest and personal passions.
1580
Source: Essays
Two-faced people are useful for what they bring, but one must be careful that they take away as little as possible.
1580
Source: Essays
I do not wish to be regarded as a servant so affectionate, so loyal, that I am found fit to engage in a betrayal.
1580
Source: Essays
Innocence itself could not, in our time, either negotiate without dissimulation, or bargain without being obliged to lie.
1580
Source: Essays
The way of truth is one and simple; that of private profit [...] is double, unequal, and random.
1580
Source: Essays
It is enough to dip our pens in ink, without also dipping them in blood.
1580
Source: Essays
It is wrong to try to justify the honesty and beauty of an action by the mere fact that it is useful.
1580
Source: Essays
To philosophize is nothing other than to prepare for death.
1580
Source: Essays
All human wisdom and reason ultimately lead to this result: to teach us not to fear dying.
1580
Source: Essays
Whatever philosophers may say, even in the practice of virtue, the goal of our aspirations is pleasure.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no pleasure we know of, the pursuit of which is not in itself a satisfaction.
1580
Source: Essays
One of the main benefits of virtue is to inspire in us a contempt for death, which allows us to live in gentle tranquility.
1580
Source: Essays
The goal of our existence is death; it is the fatal objective towards which we tend; if it frightens us, how can we take a step forward without being feverish about it?
1580
Source: Essays
Do not young and old leave life under the same conditions? No one leaves it otherwise than if they were just entering it.
1580
Source: Essays
Since [death] inevitably catches those who flee [...], let us learn to await it steadfastly and to fight against it.
1580
Source: Essays
We do not know where death awaits us, so let us wait for it everywhere. To meditate on death is to meditate on freedom; he who has learned to die has unlearned servitude.
1580
Source: Essays
Every minute it seems to me that I am touching my last hour, and I repeat to myself endlessly: 'What will fatally happen one day, can happen today.'
1580
Source: Essays
I want death to find me planting my cabbages, indifferent to its coming, and even more so to the obligation it will place upon me to leave my gardening unfinished.
1580
Source: Essays
To regret not being alive in a hundred years is as foolish as regretting not having been born a hundred years earlier.
1580
Source: Essays
Your life's continuous effect is to lead you to death. While you are alive, you are constantly in the throes of death.
1580
Source: Essays
Life, in itself, is neither good nor evil; it becomes good or evil according to what you make of it.
1580
Source: Essays
One man has lived long, who has lived little. Think on it while you can; it depends on you, and not on the number of your years, to have lived enough.
1580
Source: Essays
The world is nothing but variety and dissimilarity.
1580
Source: Essays
Vices are all alike in that they are all vices [...] but though they are equally vices, they are not equal vices.
1580
Source: Essays
The confusion of the order and measure of sins is dangerous: murderers, traitors, tyrants gain too much from it.
1580
Source: Essays
The main office of wisdom is to distinguish between good and evil.
1580
Source: Essays
There are vices which have I know not what of the noble [...] this one [drunkenness] is all corporeal and terrestrial.
1580
Source: Essays
The worst state of man is that in which he loses the knowledge and governance of himself.
1580
Source: Essays
Wine makes the most intimate secrets spill out from those who have partaken of it beyond measure.
1580
Source: Essays
My taste and my constitution are more hostile to this vice [drunkenness] than my discourse.
1580
Source: Essays
I find that this vice [drunkenness] costs our conscience less than the others.
1580
Source: Essays
The pleasure that we wish to take into account in the course of our lives should occupy more space.
1580
Source: Essays
However wise he may be, in the end he is but a man: what is more frail, more wretched, and more a thing of nothing?
1580
Source: Essays
Wisdom does not overcome our natural conditions.
1580
Source: Essays
He must tremble when standing on the edge of a precipice, like a child: Nature having wished to reserve for herself these slight marks of her authority.
1580
Source: Essays
All actions beyond ordinary bounds are subject to sinister interpretation.
1580
Source: Essays
Our soul cannot from its seat reach so high: it must leave it and arise [...] and ravish its man so far that he is afterwards astonished at his own deed.
1580
Source: Essays
What is profit for one is loss for another.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no profit for anyone, without it being at the expense of others.
1580
Source: Essays
By that reckoning, every gain of any kind would be condemnable.
1580
Source: Essays
The merchant only does good business because the youth loves pleasure.
1580
Source: Essays
The farmer [only does good business] when the grain is expensive.
1580
Source: Essays
The architect [only prospers] when houses fall into ruin.
1580
Source: Essays
All that pertains to the magistracy lives off our lawsuits and our quarrels.
1580
Source: Essays
The ministers of religion themselves draw honor and profit from our death and our weaknesses.
1580
Source: Essays
No physician [...] sees with satisfaction even his own friends being well.
1580
Source: Essays
[No] soldier [sees with satisfaction] his country at peace with neighboring peoples.
1580
Source: Essays
Anyone who looks into himself sees that most of the wishes he makes [...] are only realized at the expense of others.
1580
Source: Essays
Our inmost desires, for the most part, are born and nourished at the expense of others.
1580
Source: Essays
In this, nature does not depart from its essential principle.
1580
Source: Essays
Everything is born, develops, and grows only through the alteration and transformation of another.
1580
Source: Essays
As soon as anything changes its way of being, it immediately results in the death of what it was before.
1580
Source: Essays
He wanted to live, not according to the times, not according to men, not according to business, but according to himself.
1580
Source: Essays
He was made to appreciate science and duty, without forcing his will, [...] his father had him awakened to the sound of an instrument.
1580
Source: Essays
During the troubles in his province, [...] he was tossed about by all hands, a Ghibelline to some, a Guelph to others.
1580
Source: Essays
Do not think that his death was any different from the general character of his writings.
1580
Source: Essays
Montaigne is an author one can hardly afford to ignore; but he is also perhaps one of the most dangerous to be studied by the young.
1580
Source: Essays
One admires in Montaigne the piquancy, the unexpectedness of expression, the astonishing originality of thought, and that inexhaustible fertility, which has him repeat the same thing twenty times with ever new verve.
1580
Source: Essays
Except for a small number of men [...], no one will read the Essays from one end to the other without feeling a profound boredom.
1580
Source: Essays
For [certain] philosophers, the Essays are an arsenal where almost all the weapons they wish to turn against religion and morality can be found.
1580
Source: Essays
[Montaigne:] I may presently change, not only my fortune, but also my intention. [...] I may indeed contradict myself at random; but the truth, I do not contradict it.
1580
Source: Essays
[Montaigne:] My soul is always in a state of apprenticeship and trial.
1580
Source: Essays
[Montaigne:] I am almost drawn to wherever I lean, in any way whatsoever, and am carried away by my own weight.
1580
Source: Essays
[Pascal on Montaigne:] His sentiments on death are horrible. He inspires a nonchalance for salvation, without fear or repentance.
1580
Source: Essays
[Pascal on Montaigne:] Throughout his book, he thinks only of dying in a cowardly and soft manner.
1580
Source: Essays
[Nicole on Montaigne:] He very well discovered the nothingness of greatness and the uselessness of the sciences.
1580
Source: Essays
[Nicole on Montaigne:] He concluded that there was [...] nothing to do but to try to pleasantly pass the little space that is given to us.
1580
Source: Essays
When I write, I make use of neither books nor the memories I have of them, for fear that they might influence my style of writing [...].
1580
Source: Essays
I do correct an accidental error [...], but as for the daily and habitual imperfections that are in me, it would be disloyal to make them disappear.
1580
Source: Essays
I have achieved what I wanted, since everyone recognizes me in my book, and finds the book in me.
1580
Source: Essays
What vexes me is that my soul usually gives itself over to its deepest reveries [...] unexpectedly, when I least seek them, and they vanish suddenly because I have nothing at hand to fix them.
1580
Source: Essays
Love is nothing but the thirst we have for the enjoyment we experience with the object of our desires.
1580
Source: Essays
We hide and confine ourselves to build a man; to destroy him, we seek broad daylight and wide open spaces.
1580
Source: Essays
Are we such brutes as to call an act brutal to which we owe our very existence!
1580
Source: Essays
What a monstrous animal is man; he is a horror to himself; his pleasures are a burden to him, he seeks out evil!
1580
Source: Essays
We are ingenious only in mistreating ourselves; it is to this above all that we apply all the resources of our mind, which is a dangerous instrument of disorder.
1580
Source: Essays
Alas, poor man! You have enough inconveniences that you are forced to endure, without increasing them still more by your own inventions!
1580
Source: Essays
He who says everything cloys and disgusts us. He who, on the contrary, is careful in his expression, leads us to think more than is there.
1580
Source: Essays
He who finds enjoyment only in the enjoyment itself, who wants to win only the jackpot, who loves the hunt only for the catch, is not of our school.
1580
Source: Essays
Our life is made partly of folly, partly of prudence; he who deals only with what is considered proper and regular leaves aside more than half of it.
1580
Source: Essays
I hate a stagnant and drowsy idleness almost as much as an arduous and painful occupation; the one agitates me, the other puts me to sleep.
1580
Source: Essays
Males and females come from the same mold and, except for their education and customs, the difference is not great.
1580
Source: Essays
It is very easy to verify that great authors, when writing of causes, use not only those they believe to be true, but also those they do not believe, provided they have some invention and beauty.
1580
Source: Essays
We cannot be sure of the master cause, so we pile up several, to see if by chance it may be found among them.
1580
Source: Essays
Even to fear, courage is required.
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing that throws us into so much danger as an unthinking eagerness to get out of it.
1580
Source: Essays
Foresight is equally fitting for what touches us for good and for ill. To consider and judge the danger is in a way the opposite of being astonished by it.
1580
Source: Essays
Whoever had made my soul lose its footing would never set it upright in its place again. It feels and searches itself too keenly and profoundly.
1580
Source: Essays
He who has once been truly foolish will never at any other time be truly wise.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a kind of pusillanimity in monarchs, [...] to work at making themselves valued and seen through excessive spending.
1580
Source: Essays
Liberality itself is not in its proper luster in a sovereign hand [...] a King has nothing properly his own; he owes himself to others.
1580
Source: Essays
Covetousness has nothing so proper to it as to be ungrateful.
1580
Source: Essays
We do not advance, we rather roam, and turn this way and that; we retrace our steps. I fear that our knowledge is weak in every sense.
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing unique and rare with regard to Nature, but there is with regard to our knowledge, which is a miserable foundation for our rules [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Our world has just discovered another [...] so new and so childlike that it is still being taught its A, B, C.
1580
Source: Essays
We have used their ignorance and inexperience to more easily bend them toward treachery, lust, avarice, and toward all sorts of inhumanity and cruelty, following the example and pattern of our own customs.
1580
Source: Essays
So many cities razed, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people put to the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the trade of pearls and pepper. Mechanical victories.
1580
Source: Essays
most of our actions are but mask and makeup [...].
1580
Source: Essays
In judging these events, we must consider how our souls are often stirred by diverse passions.
1580
Source: Essays
In our souls, although there are diverse movements that stir it, there must be one that holds the field.
1580
Source: Essays
Due to the volatility and suppleness of our soul, the weakest [passions] on occasion regain their place and make a short charge in their turn.
1580
Source: Essays
We see not only children, who naively follow nature, often cry and laugh at the same thing.
1580
Source: Essays
None of us can boast [...] that on leaving his family and friends he does not feel his courage shudder.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not strange to mourn him dead, whom one would by no means wish to be alive.
1580
Source: Essays
When I scold my servant, I scold with all my heart [...]; but, once that smoke has passed, if he needs me, I will gladly help him: I turn the page in an instant.
1580
Source: Essays
No quality embraces us purely and universally.
1580
Source: Essays
If it were not the behavior of a fool to talk to oneself, there is not a day when I am not heard grumbling to myself and against myself.
1580
Source: Essays
He who, seeing my expression sometimes cold, sometimes loving towards my wife, thinks that one or the other is feigned, is a fool.
1580
Source: Essays
So does our soul dart its points diversely and imperceptibly.
1580
Source: Essays
We have pursued with resolute will the revenge of an injury, and felt a singular contentment in victory, yet we weep for it.
1580
Source: Essays
Our soul looks at the thing with another eye, and represents it to itself with another face: for everything has several angles and several sheens.
1580
Source: Essays
Wishing to make a continuous body out of this whole sequence, we deceive ourselves.
1580
Source: Essays
I observe in my travels [...] to always learn something from communication with others (which is one of the finest schools there can be).
1580
Source: Essays
[I seek to] always bring those with whom I confer back to the subject they know best.
1580
Source: Essays
It most often happens [...] that everyone chooses to discourse on another's trade rather than on their own, thinking it is so much new reputation acquired.
1580
Source: Essays
Thus one must always endeavor to send back the architect, the painter, the shoemaker, [...] each to their own domain.
1580
Source: Essays
When reading histories, which is a subject for all people, I am accustomed to considering who the writers are.
1580
Source: Essays
The servant's duty [is] to faithfully represent things in their entirety, [...] so that the freedom to order, judge, and choose, remains with the master.
1580
Source: Essays
To alter or hide the truth from him, for fear he might take it otherwise than he should [...] belongs to him who gives the law, not to him who receives it.
1580
Source: Essays
I would not wish to be served in this way in my own small affair.
1580
Source: Essays
We so willingly withdraw ourselves from command, under some pretext, and encroach upon the master's authority.
1580
Source: Essays
Everyone aspires so naturally to liberty and authority.
1580
Source: Essays
To a superior, no utility [...] should be as dear as their simple and straightforward obedience.
1580
Source: Essays
One corrupts the office of commanding when one obeys by discretion, not by subjection.
1580
Source: Essays
This so constrained obedience belongs only to precise and pre-established commands.
1580
Source: Essays
[Subordinates] do not simply execute, but also form and shape the master's will by their counsel.
1580
Source: Essays
Men of understanding criticize the practice of assigning tasks so narrowly defined to their agents that for the smallest things they must have recourse to their orders.
1580
Source: Essays
No one is exempt from talking nonsense. The misfortune is to do it studiously.
1580
Source: Essays
Our structure, both public and private, is full of imperfection. But there is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself.
1580
Source: Essays
Our being is cemented with sickly qualities; ambition, jealousy, envy, revenge, superstition, despair, lodge in us so naturally that their image is also found in beasts.
1580
Source: Essays
The public good requires that one betray, lie, and massacre; let us resign this commission to more obedient and pliable people.
1580
Source: Essays
Naivety and pure truth, in any age, still find their opportunity and their place.
1580
Source: Essays
Anger and hatred are beyond the duty of justice, and are passions that serve only those who do not hold to their duty by simple reason.
1580
Source: Essays
I will follow the good party to the fire, but only to the fire, if I can.
1580
Source: Essays
I do not portray being. I portray the passage: not a passage from one age to another [...] but from day to day, from minute to minute. My story must be adapted to the moment.
1580
Source: Essays
Every man bears the entire form of the human condition.
1580
Source: Essays
If the world complains that I speak too much of myself, I complain that it does not even think of itself.
1580
Source: Essays
Vice leaves, like an ulcer in the flesh, a repentance in the soul, which always scratches and bloodies itself.
1580
Source: Essays
To base the reward for virtuous actions on the approval of others is to build on a foundation that is too uncertain and troubled.
1580
Source: Essays
I have my own laws and my own court to judge me, and I turn to them more than anywhere else. I do restrain my actions according to others, but I extend them only according to myself.
1580
Source: Essays
To win a breach, to conduct an embassy, to govern a people, these are brilliant actions. To chide, laugh, sell, pay, love, hate, and to converse with one's family and with oneself gently and justly [...] is a rarer, more difficult, and less noticed thing.
1580
Source: Essays
Our principal ability is to know how to apply ourselves to various practices. To be held and bound by necessity to a single way of life is to exist, but it is not to live.
1580
Source: Essays
From what vanity can it come that we place beneath us, and interpret with disdain, the effects that we can neither imitate nor comprehend?
1580
Source: Essays
It is likely that we hardly know what beauty is in nature and in general, since to human and our own beauty we give so many diverse forms [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Indeed, when I imagine man completely naked [...] his flaws, his natural subjection, and his imperfections, I find that we have had more reason than any other animal to cover ourselves.
1580
Source: Essays
We attribute to ourselves imaginary and fantastic goods, future and absent goods [...], and to them [the animals], we leave as their share essential, manageable and palpable goods: peace, rest, security, innocence and health.
1580
Source: Essays
We have for our part inconstancy, irresolution, uncertainty, grief, superstition, solicitude for things to come [...], ambition, avarice, jealousy, envy, unruly appetites [...], war, lying, disloyalty, slander, and curiosity.
1580
Source: Essays
Surely we have strangely overpaid for this fine reason of which we boast, [...] if we have bought it at the price of this infinite number of passions to which we are ceaselessly prey.
1580
Source: Essays
I have seen in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred laborers, wiser and happier than university rectors, and whom I would rather resemble.
1580
Source: Essays
The first law that God ever gave to man was a law of pure obedience [...], inasmuch as to obey is the proper office of a reasonable soul.
1580
Source: Essays
The plague of man is the opinion of knowing.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems, in truth, that nature, to console us for our miserable and wretched state, has given us nothing for our share but presumption.
1580
Source: Essays
As long as he thinks he has some means and some strength of his own, man will never recognize what he owes to his master.
1580
Source: Essays
When true evils fail us, knowledge lends us its own.
1580
Source: Essays
Our well-being is nothing but the privation of being unwell.
1580
Source: Essays
It has happened to the truly learned as it happens to ears of wheat: they go on rising and holding their heads high and proud, as long as they are empty; but when they are full and swollen [...], they begin to humble themselves.
1580
Source: Essays
Ignorance that knows itself, that judges itself, and that condemns itself, is not a complete ignorance: to be so, it must be ignorant of itself.
1580
Source: Essays
These are my fancies, by which I do not attempt to make known things, but myself.
1580
Source: Essays
And if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention.
1580
Source: Essays
I do not count my borrowings, I weigh them.
1580
Source: Essays
The recognition of ignorance is one of the finest and surest testimonies of judgment that I find.
1580
Source: Essays
My design is to pass gently, and not laboriously, what is left of my life. There is nothing for which I would want to break my head: not even for science [...].
1580
Source: Essays
I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by an honest amusement: or if I study, I seek in them only the knowledge that treats of knowing myself, and that instructs me how to die well and to live well.
1580
Source: Essays
Difficulties, if I meet with any in reading, I do not bite my nails over them: I leave them there, after having made a charge or two at them.
1580
Source: Essays
I do nothing without gaiety: and too firm a continuation and contention dazzles my judgment, saddens it, and wearies it.
1580
Source: Essays
If a book bores me, I take up another, and only devote myself to it at hours when the boredom of doing nothing begins to seize me.
1580
Source: Essays
What I opine on is to declare the measure of my own sight, not the measure of things.
1580
Source: Essays
For me, who only asks to become wiser, not more learned or eloquent, these logical and Aristotelian ordinances are not to the purpose.
1580
Source: Essays
I have a singular curiosity [...] to know the soul and the naive judgments of my authors.
1580
Source: Essays
The only good histories are those which have been written by those who themselves commanded affairs, or who participated in conducting them [...].
1580
Source: Essays
I like Historians who are either very simple, or excellent.
1580
Source: Essays
The in-between [historians] [...] spoil everything for us: they want to chew our food for us; they assume the right to judge and consequently to slant History to their own fancy.
1580
Source: Essays
There is a greater distance from one man to another than there is from a man to a beast.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a marvel that, except for ourselves, nothing is valued except for its own qualities.
1580
Source: Essays
Why do we not value a man for what is his own? He has a grand entourage, a beautiful palace, so much credit [...] all of that is around him, not in him.
1580
Source: Essays
A man must be judged by himself, not by his adornments.
1580
Source: Essays
Do you know why you esteem him as great? You include the height of his stilts. The pedestal is not part of the statue.
1580
Source: Essays
Measure him without his stilts. Let him set aside his riches and honors, and present himself in his shirt.
1580
Source: Essays
What soul does he have? Is it beautiful, capable [...]? Is it rich of its own substance, or of what is borrowed? Does fortune have a hold on it?
1580
Source: Essays
Such a man is [...] above Kingdoms and Duchies: he is his own empire unto himself.
1580
Source: Essays
It is the enjoying, not the possessing, that makes us happy.
1580
Source: Essays
It is much easier and more pleasant to follow than to lead [...] it is a great peace of mind to only have to follow a set path and to answer only for oneself.
1580
Source: Essays
He who does not allow himself the leisure to be thirsty cannot take pleasure in drinking.
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing so obstructive, so distasteful, as abundance.
1580
Source: Essays
Everyone fears being watched and controlled: [the powerful] are so even in their countenances and their thoughts.
1580
Source: Essays
What proof of affection can I draw from one who owes me, whether he wishes it or not, everything he is capable of?
1580
Source: Essays
Why do you not settle now into that state to which you say you aspire, and spare yourself so much labor and hazard that you place in between?
1580
Source: Essays
The diversity of customs from one nation to another affects me only through the pleasure of variety. Every custom has its reason.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
I observe this practice in my travels [...] to always learn something from communication with others, which is one of the finest schools there can be.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
I am of the opinion that one must lend oneself to the customs of the place where one is.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
The convenience of an inn, for me, is the bed; for, apart from eating and sleeping, all my other moments are spent outside the inn.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
One sees nothing of Rome but the sky under which it sat, and the outline of its site.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
I know of no feast so good that it is worth eating alone.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
I am ashamed to say it, but we find it difficult to give up this freedom to command and to be obeyed.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
In Rome, the courtesans display themselves with an art and a magnificence that make them seem like princesses.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
I yielded so completely to the local laws that I would rather have my money stolen than my night's sleep.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
[The Swiss] have this good custom [...] of never forcing you to eat or drink more than you want.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
I saw in some place houses built in such a way that the master of the house could turn his house and set it to face any wind.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
The main purpose of my journey was to see Rome.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
Irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent vice of our nature.
1580
Source: Essays
I find it harder to believe in the constancy of men than anything else, and nothing more easily than their inconstancy.
1580
Source: Essays
We float between diverse opinions: we want nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.
1580
Source: Essays
If I speak of myself in different ways, it is because I look at myself in different ways.
1580
Source: Essays
We are all patchwork, and of a texture so shapeless and diverse that every piece, every moment, plays its own game.
1580
Source: Essays
The worst state of man is that in which he loses the knowledge and governance of himself.
1580
Source: Essays
There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.
1580
Source: Essays
Life depends on the will of others, death on our own.
1580
Source: Essays
The most voluntary death is the most beautiful.
1580
Source: Essays
It is against nature for us to despise ourselves and hold ourselves in disregard; it is a peculiar malady [...] to hate and disdain oneself.
1580
Source: Essays
For dying, which is the greatest task we have to do, practice cannot help us. [...] we are all apprentices when we come to it.
1580
Source: Essays
Many things seem greater in imagination than in effect.
1580
Source: Essays
My trade and my art is to live.
1580
Source: Essays
This is not my doctrine, it is my study; and it is not another's lesson, it is my own.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not my deeds that I write; it is I, it is my essence.
1580
Source: Essays
Often we think we have left our affairs, when we have only changed them.
1580
Source: Essays
Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and our desires do not abandon us when we change countries.
1580
Source: Essays
Is it enough, then, to flee one's homeland to flee from oneself?
1580
Source: Essays
It is not enough to have distanced oneself from the crowd; [...] one must get away from the popular conditions that are within us: one must sequester and reclaim oneself.
1580
Source: Essays
Our disease is in our soul, and the soul cannot escape from itself.
1580
Source: Essays
That is true solitude, which may be enjoyed in the midst of cities and the courts of Kings.
1580
Source: Essays
Certainly, the man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.
1580
Source: Essays
We must reserve a back-shop, all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.
1580
Source: Essays
We have a soul that can be turned back upon itself; it can keep its own company.
1580
Source: Essays
Who does not willingly exchange health, rest, and life, for reputation and glory? The most useless, vain, and false currency in our use.
1580
Source: Essays
We have lived enough for others, let us live at least this remaining shred of life for ourselves.
1580
Source: Essays
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
1580
Source: Essays
Glory and tranquility are things that cannot lodge in the same dwelling.
1580
Source: Essays
What you must seek is not that the world speaks of you, but how you must speak to yourself.
1580
Source: Essays
Retire into yourself, but first prepare yourself to receive yourself there: it would be madness to trust yourself if you do not know how to govern yourself.
1580
Source: Essays
Know that a good conqueror [...] values and loves his new prisoner more, when he surrenders at once, if he has fought well.
1580
Source: Essays
It is love [...] the strongest poison, to which any poor heart has ever opened the door.
1580
Source: Essays
If one must surrender, then the time has come, when reason is no longer on one's side.
1580
Source: Essays
This great King [Love] requires, even when he is wrong, that reason serve him.
1580
Source: Essays
Let the one who forbids me to mourn be the one to heal me.
1580
Source: Essays
Besides, what is more beautiful than a faithful friendship?
1580
Source: Essays
Each one feels their own torment and knows what they endure.
1580
Source: Essays
I say what my heart, what my pain tells me.
1580
Source: Essays
He loves but little who loves by measure.
1580
Source: Essays
I know how to love, I know how to hate as well.
1580
Source: Essays
If I do not feel, how do you want me to love?
1580
Source: Essays
To be rewarded with myself, she must first give to me.
1580
Source: Essays
For it is to punish you that I now forgive you.
1580
Source: Essays
My love is the thread by which my life hangs.
1580
Source: Essays
O happy, and happy again, is he who without respite is always unhappy.
1580
Source: Essays
Caesar's commentaries should [...] be the breviary of every man of war, for he is the true and sovereign model of the military art.
1580
Source: Essays
To reassure his frightened troops [...], he himself would exaggerate the enemy's superiority.
1580
Source: Essays
He accustomed his soldiers to obey, without meddling in controlling or discussing their leader's plans.
1580
Source: Essays
The most essential talent of a captain is to know how to seize opportunities when they arise and to act with diligence.
1580
Source: Essays
He asked of his soldiers, in terms of virtue, only that they be valiant, and hardly punished among them anything but mutiny and disobedience.
1580
Source: Essays
He liked his soldiers to be richly armed [...] so that, being careful to preserve them, they would put more energy into defending them.
1580
Source: Essays
He quelled disorders more by his authority and by being audacious, than by gentleness.
1580
Source: Essays
He used to say that he preferred a victory obtained through negotiation over one won by sheer force.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems I read in many of his exploits a certain resolution to perish, in order to flee the shame of being vanquished.
1580
Source: Essays
[Such men] have a supernatural confidence in their fortune; thus, he said that one must execute, not deliberate upon, great enterprises.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not the number of men, but that of the men fit for combat that gives the advantage; the rest causes more trouble than it provides help.
1580
Source: Essays
He who commands a whole country must never immobilize himself [...] he must maintain his freedom of movement, in order to provide direction to all parts.
1580
Source: Essays
A leader must not compromise the high renown owed to so many victories, which a single defeat could cause him to lose.
1580
Source: Essays
Passion commands us far more vividly than reason.
1580
Source: Essays
Caesar's soldiers were accustomed to giving life to others, and not to receiving it from them.
1580
Source: Essays
Yet I do not want a man, for fear of falling into that excess [of presumption], [...] to misjudge himself and value himself less than he is worth; our judgment must in all things maintain its rectitude.
1580
Source: Essays
Everything with us is convention; conventions carry us away and make us forsake the reality of things; we cling to the branches and let go of the trunk and the essential part.
1580
Source: Essays
Philosophy never seems to me to be in a better position than when it combats our presumption and our vanity, and when it acknowledges in good faith its irresolution, its weakness, and its ignorance.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems to me that the origin of the greatest errors we commit [...] is the excessively high opinion man has of himself.
1580
Source: Essays
I am envious of the happiness of those who know how to be happy and satisfied with what they do, for that is an easy way to give oneself pleasure since one draws it from oneself.
1580
Source: Essays
My works are so far from satisfying me that as often as I revise them, I feel vexation.
1580
Source: Essays
Unable to control events, I control myself; I submit to them, unable to submit them to me.
1580
Source: Essays
Uncertain evils are those that torment me the most.
1580
Source: Essays
One rarely succeeds in reaching high stations without first venturing what one possesses [...]. It is folly to let go of what one holds in the uncertain hope of increasing it.
1580
Source: Essays
One must not always say everything, that would be foolish; but what one says must be as one thinks it; otherwise, it is wrong.
1580
Source: Essays
He who does not know how to dissemble does not know how to reign.
1580
Source: Essays
In public affairs, there is no course, however bad, that, if consistently followed [...], is not preferable to change and upheaval.
1580
Source: Essays
The world always looks straight ahead; I turn my gaze inward, I hold it there and amuse it. Everyone looks before them, [...] I roll about within myself.
1580
Source: Essays
We readily admit others' superiority in courage, in physical strength, [...] but we concede superiority in judgment to no one.
1580
Source: Essays
The esteem that everyone seeks to acquire through a sharp and quick mind, I claim to achieve through a well-ordered one.
1580
Source: Essays
I want to show you how much gentler the religion I hold is than the one you profess. Yours advised you to kill me without a hearing [...], and mine commands me to forgive you.
1580
Source: Essays
Why do you live, if it matters to so many that you die? [...] Is your life worth causing so much damage to preserve it?
1580
Source: Essays
When the usual remedies are of no avail, [doctors] try the opposite. By severity, you have [...] gained nothing: begin to experiment how gentleness and clemency will succeed for you.
1580
Source: Essays
So vain and frivolous a thing is human prudence! And through all our projects, our counsels, and precautions, fortune always maintains possession of events.
1580
Source: Essays
I let nature take its course and presuppose that it has provided itself with teeth and claws to defend itself from the assaults that come its way [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Not only in medicine, but in many more certain arts, fortune has a large share.
1580
Source: Essays
A competent reader often discovers in the writings of others perfections other than those the author put in and perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects.
1580
Source: Essays
All that our wisdom can do is not much: the sharper and keener it is, the more weakness it finds in itself and the more it distrusts itself.
1580
Source: Essays
The surest course [...] is [...] to fall back on the side where there is more honesty and justice; and, since one is in doubt of the shortest path, always to keep to the straight one.
1580
Source: Essays
How difficult it is to guard oneself from an enemy who is hidden by the face of the most obliging friend we have, and to know the inner wills and thoughts of those who assist us!
1580
Source: Essays
Nothing noble is done without risk.
1580
Source: Essays
Prudence, so tender and circumspect, is the mortal enemy of high achievements.
1580
Source: Essays
Fear and distrust attract the offense and invite it.
1580
Source: Essays
Boldness [...] represents itself, when needed, as magnificently in a doublet as in arms, in a study as in a camp, with arm hanging as with arm raised.
1580
Source: Essays
It is an excellent way to win the heart and will of another, to go and submit and entrust oneself to them, provided it is done freely [...] and that one brings to it a pure and clear trust.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems that fortune takes pleasure in taking us at our word.
1580
Source: Essays
I have heard several examples of people who became ill after undertaking to feign it.
1580
Source: Essays
It is possible that the faculty of sight became dulled from being so long without exercise [...].
1580
Source: Essays
If I wish to laugh at a fool, I need not look far; I laugh at myself.
1580
Source: Essays
[A person] suddenly lost her sight. [...] she does not realize she is blind, and [...] says the house is dark.
1580
Source: Essays
What we laugh at in her, I pray you believe, happens to each of us: no one knows they are avaricious, no one covetous.
1580
Source: Essays
The blind, at least, ask for a guide; we lead ourselves astray.
1580
Source: Essays
I am not ambitious, we say, but in Rome one cannot live otherwise.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not my fault if I am angry, if I have not yet established any certain course of life; it is the fault of youth.
1580
Source: Essays
Let us not seek our ills outside of ourselves; our evil is within us, it is planted in our very entrails.
1580
Source: Essays
And the very fact that we do not feel we are sick makes our recovery more difficult.
1580
Source: Essays
If we do not begin early to examine ourselves, when shall we have provided for so many wounds and so many ills?
1580
Source: Essays
We have a very gentle medicine, philosophy: for with other remedies, one feels the pleasure only after the cure, but this one pleases and cures at the same time.
1580
Source: Essays
The power of imagination can certainly contribute to this [...].
1580
Source: Essays
When doctors cannot purge a sickness, they divert it and deflect it to another, less dangerous part. I notice that this is also the most common prescription for the maladies of the soul.
1580
Source: Essays
It belongs to Socrates alone to greet death with an ordinary face, to familiarize himself with it and to jest with it.
1580
Source: Essays
They flee the struggle; they divert their consideration from death, as one distracts children while about to give them the prick of the lancet.
1580
Source: Essays
We are always thinking of something else; the hope of a better life sustains and supports us, or the hope of our children's worth, or the future glory of our name [...].
1580
Source: Essays
If your affection in love is too powerful, dissipate it [...] break it into various desires [...] weaken it [...] by dividing and diverting it.
1580
Source: Essays
Variation always relieves, dissolves, and dissipates. If I cannot fight it, I escape it; and in fleeing it I go astray, I use cunning.
1580
Source: Essays
Little things divert and distract us, for little things hold us.
1580
Source: Essays
I viewed death nonchalantly when I saw it universally, as the end of life; I rebuke it in bulk; but in detail, it plunders me.
1580
Source: Essays
One must see one's vice and study it to speak of it. Those who hide it from others ordinarily hide it from themselves.
1580
Source: Essays
The maladies of the soul grow obscure in their strength; the sickest person feels them the least.
1580
Source: Essays
Wisdom has its excesses, and needs moderation no less than folly.
1580
Source: Essays
Let childhood look forward, and old age backward: was this not what the double face of Janus signified?
1580
Source: Essays
It is no longer time to kick when one has let oneself be shackled. One must manage one's freedom prudently; but once one has submitted to the obligation, one must abide by the laws of common duty [...].
1580
Source: Essays
It is a betrayal to marry without wedding oneself.
1580
Source: Essays
We create and poison vices not according to nature, but according to our interest, whereby they take on so many unequal forms.
1580
Source: Essays
The word of warriors [...] is subject to caution.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] one cannot be too wary until the final signature is given, not to mention that even at that moment, all is not yet over.
1580
Source: Essays
It has always been very risky [...] to allow soldiers entry as soon as the surrender is obtained.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] the love of plunder, the spirit of vengeance overriding respect for [...] authority and the observance of military discipline.
1580
Source: Essays
[The] law of war [...] is above the laws of divine justice, as well as those of human justice [...].
1580
Source: Essays
It is often during conferences for the capitulation of a place that the enemy takes possession of it.
1580
Source: Essays
One cannot be blamed for, in certain circumstances, taking advantage of the enemy's mistakes, just as [...] we take advantage of their cowardice.
1580
Source: Essays
War indeed allows as lawful many practices that are condemnable outside of it.
1580
Source: Essays
The principle that 'no one should seek to profit from another's foolishness' [...] is at fault here.
1580
Source: Essays
Victory should always be honorably contested.
1580
Source: Essays
Those who [...] take part in a race must indeed use all their strength to win [...]; but they are not permitted to lay a hand on them to stop them [...].
1580
Source: Essays
It is not in my dignity to seek a victory by stealth.
1580
Source: Essays
I would rather have cause to complain of fortune than to blush for my victory.
1580
Source: Essays
[He] wants to conquer, not by surprise, but by sheer force of arms.
1580
Source: Essays
As useful thoughts become fuller and more solid, they also become more cumbersome and burdensome.
1580
Source: Essays
Wisdom has its excesses, and needs moderation no less than folly.
1580
Source: Essays
Let childhood look forward, and old age backward.
1580
Source: Essays
I would rather be old for a shorter time than be old before my time.
1580
Source: Essays
Even the smallest occasions for pleasure that I can find, I seize them.
1580
Source: Essays
My philosophy is in action, in natural and present practice, little in fantasy.
1580
Source: Essays
Since it is the privilege of the mind to recover from old age, [...] let it grow green, let it flourish in the meantime, if it can, like mistletoe on a dead tree.
1580
Source: Essays
I have ordered myself to dare to say all that I dare to do, and I am displeased even by unpublishable thoughts.
1580
Source: Essays
Whoever bound himself to say everything would bind himself to do nothing of which he is constrained to be silent.
1580
Source: Essays
The maladies of the soul grow more obscure in their strength: the sickest man feels them the least.
1580
Source: Essays
A good marriage, if there be any, rejects the company and conditions of love: it tries to represent those of friendship.
1580
Source: Essays
It happens as with cages: the birds outside despair of getting in, and those inside are equally anxious to get out.
1580
Source: Essays
Women are not at all wrong when they refuse the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, since it is men who have made them without their consent.
1580
Source: Essays
I am content to be less praised, provided I am better known.
1580
Source: Essays
It is folly to want to shed light on an ill for which there is no medicine that does not worsen and aggravate it.
1580
Source: Essays
We cannot be sure of the master cause; we pile up many of them, to see if by chance it will be found in that number.
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing that throws us into so much danger as an unthinking eagerness to get out of it.
1580
Source: Essays
To consider and judge danger is in some ways the opposite of being stunned by it.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a kind of small-mindedness in monarchs [...] to labour to prove their worth and appear important through excessive spending.
1580
Source: Essays
A King has nothing that is properly his own; he owes his very self to others.
1580
Source: Essays
If a prince's liberality is without discretion and without measure, I prefer him to be a miser.
1580
Source: Essays
He whose mind is on taking, no longer thinks of what he has taken. Covetousness has nothing so proper to it as to be ungrateful.
1580
Source: Essays
The more a Prince exhausts himself in giving, the more he impoverishes himself of friends.
1580
Source: Essays
We do not advance, we wander rather, and turn this way and that. We walk back and forth on our own steps.
1580
Source: Essays
I fear that our knowledge is weak in every sense; we see neither very far forward nor very far back.
1580
Source: Essays
Even if everything that has come down to us from the past were true [...], it would be less than nothing compared to what is unknown.
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing unique or rare with respect to nature, but only with respect to our knowledge, which is a miserable foundation for our rules.
1580
Source: Essays
We have taken advantage of their ignorance and inexperience to bend them more easily toward treachery, lewdness, avarice, and every kind of inhumanity and cruelty, after the example and pattern of our own customs.
1580
Source: Essays
So many cities razed, so many nations exterminated, [...] the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down for the trade of pearls and pepper: mechanical victories.
1580
Source: Essays
The King, fixing his eyes on him fiercely and sternly, [...] said to him only these words, in a rough and firm voice: And I, am I in a bath?
1580
Source: Essays
It seems to me that virtue is something other, and more noble, than the inclinations to goodness that are born in us.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems that the name of virtue presupposes difficulty and contrast, and that it cannot be exercised without an opposing party.
1580
Source: Essays
Virtue refuses ease as a companion [...]. It demands a rough and thorny path.
1580
Source: Essays
If virtue can only shine through the struggle against contrary appetites, shall we then say that it cannot do without the assistance of vice?
1580
Source: Essays
Every death should be like its life. We do not become different for dying. I always interpret death by life.
1580
Source: Essays
[Natural goodness] seems to make a man innocent, but not virtuous: exempt from doing evil, but not quite capable of doing good.
1580
Source: Essays
When judging a particular action, one must consider many circumstances, and the whole man who produced it, before christening it.
1580
Source: Essays
My virtue is a virtue, or rather an innocence, that is accidental and fortuitous.
1580
Source: Essays
I find [...] more order and rule in my morals than in my opinion: and my desires less debauched than my reason.
1580
Source: Essays
I hate cruelty, among other vices, with a passion, both by nature and by judgment, as the extreme of all vices.
1580
Source: Essays
I hardly pity the dead, and would rather envy them; but I strongly pity the dying.
1580
Source: Essays
Even in justice, all that goes beyond simple death seems to me pure cruelty.
1580
Source: Essays
I have not been able to see even without displeasure the pursuit and killing of an innocent animal, which is defenseless and from which we receive no offense.
1580
Source: Essays
No one takes pleasure in seeing animals play and caress each other; and no one fails to take pleasure in seeing them tear each other apart and dismember one another.
1580
Source: Essays
We owe justice to men, and grace and benignity to other creatures [...]. There is some intercourse between them and us, and some mutual obligation.
1580
Source: Essays
It is said that to philosophize is to doubt; all the more so is it to be in doubt to put forward, as I do, foolish and fanciful ideas.
1580
Source: Essays
There are accidents worse than death; he who does not fear it, braves all tyrannies and all injustices.
1580
Source: Essays
What can they have to suffer, those who do not fear death?
1580
Source: Essays
[...] the most favorable gift nature has given us, which removes any right to complain about our fate, is to have left us the key to escape.
1580
Source: Essays
Our life depends on the will of others, death depends only on our own.
1580
Source: Essays
To live is to be a slave, if the freedom to die is not permitted.
1580
Source: Essays
It is weakness to give in to evil, but it is madness to sustain it.
1580
Source: Essays
There is much more courage in waiting for the shackles that bind us to fall off on their own [...] than in breaking them.
1580
Source: Essays
It is the role of fear, not of virtue, to go and hide in a pit [...] to escape the blows of fortune.
1580
Source: Essays
Most ordinarily, it is to flee other inconveniences that we arrive at this one; sometimes, it is even to escape death that we run towards it.
1580
Source: Essays
To disdain life is a ridiculous sentiment, for in the end, life is our being, our everything.
1580
Source: Essays
It is [...] vanity to wish to be other than we are; such a desire leads to nothing, it contradicts itself.
1580
Source: Essays
Man, says an ancient aphorism, has the right to hope for everything, as long as he lives.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] fortune is powerless over one who knows how to die.
1580
Source: Essays
Unbearable pain, a miserable death in prospect, seem to me the most excusable motives that can lead us to destroy ourselves.
1580
Source: Essays
No one is exempt from saying foolish things. The misfortune is to say them with painstaking care.
1580
Source: Essays
I speak to paper as I speak to the first person I meet.
1580
Source: Essays
Our structure, both public and private, is full of imperfection. But there is nothing useless in nature, not even uselessness itself.
1580
Source: Essays
In the midst of compassion, we feel inside us some bittersweet tang of malicious pleasure in seeing others suffer.
1580
Source: Essays
Whoever were to remove the seeds [of vice] from man would destroy the fundamental conditions of our life.
1580
Source: Essays
The public good requires that one betray, lie, and massacre; let us resign this commission to more obedient and pliable people.
1580
Source: Essays
Naivety and pure truth, in whatever age, still find their opportunity and their place.
1580
Source: Essays
I expect no other fruit from my action than the action itself [...] each action plays its own particular game.
1580
Source: Essays
Anger and hatred are beyond the duty of justice, and are passions that serve only those who do not hold fast enough to their duty by reason alone.
1580
Source: Essays
I will follow the good party as far as the fire, but not into it, if I can.
1580
Source: Essays
What fear once made me want, I am bound to want still, without fear.
1580
Source: Essays
One argues poorly for the honesty and beauty of an action from its utility.
1580
Source: Essays
Not all things are permissible for a person of honor in the service of their King, nor for the general cause and the laws.
1580
Source: Essays
How powerful are time and example!
1580
Source: Essays
We cannot do everything. [...] often we must, as a last resort, entrust the protection of our vessel to the sole guidance of heaven.
1580
Source: Essays
Among certain barbarian kings, the most sacred commitments were made by joining the right hands very tightly against each other, thumbs intertwined [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Doctors say that thumbs are the essential fingers of the hand, and that the word from which their Latin etymology is derived means 'to be strong, powerful'.
1580
Source: Essays
In Greek, the meaning of the word for them is, so to speak, 'another hand'.
1580
Source: Essays
In Rome, a closed and downward-facing hand, with the thumb held out below, signified satisfaction.
1580
Source: Essays
A closed hand, with the thumb held out above, was a sign of disfavor.
1580
Source: Essays
When the crowd turns its thumb upwards, to please it, the gladiators must kill each other.
1580
Source: Essays
The Romans exempted from war those who were injured in the thumb, as they no longer had enough strength to handle their weapons.
1580
Source: Essays
Augustus confiscated the property of a Roman knight who had cut off the thumbs of two of his children [...] with the criminal aim of exempting them from joining the armies.
1580
Source: Essays
The Senate [...] had condemned Caius Vatienus to life imprisonment and the confiscation of all his property for having voluntarily cut off his thumb [...] in order to avoid taking part.
1580
Source: Essays
[A general], having won a naval victory, had the thumbs of all his prisoners cut off, to deprive them of any means to fight or to handle an oar.
1580
Source: Essays
The Athenians did the same to the people of Aegina, to take away their superiority in the use of their navy.
1580
Source: Essays
In Lacedaemon, schoolmasters would punish children by biting their thumbs.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a proof [...] of the weakness of our judgment to fall for things because they are rare and new, [...] even when they are neither good nor useful.
1580
Source: Essays
In many things, extremes meet.
1580
Source: Essays
Democritus said that gods and beasts had more delicate feelings than men, who are in between.
1580
Source: Essays
Extreme fear, like courage at its peak, can sometimes produce the same physical effects on us.
1580
Source: Essays
If my flesh knew how far [...] my courage is about to take it, it would be utterly frozen.
1580
Source: Essays
Intense cold, like excessive heat, cooks and roasts.
1580
Source: Essays
Desire and satiety cause us equal pain both before and after pleasure.
1580
Source: Essays
When faced with suffering, foolishness and wisdom arrive at the same ends. The wise overcome evil, [...] the others ignore it.
1580
Source: Essays
Most men [...] find themselves between these two extremes; they see evil, they feel it, and they cannot bear it.
1580
Source: Essays
There is an initial ignorance that precedes science and a learned ignorance that follows it; science [...] creates the latter, just as it [...] destroys the former.
1580
Source: Essays
In people of average minds, erroneous opinions are born; they adopt, on mere appearance, the first interpretation that comes along.
1580
Source: Essays
Simple minds are honest people; so are philosophers. Those who sit between two stools [...], who disdain ignorance but could not reach the next level, [...] they are the ones who trouble the world.
1580
Source: Essays
Popular poetry has a naivety and grace that rival the most beautiful things it offers when [...] it reaches perfection through art.
1580
Source: Essays
Between popular poetry and perfect poetry, we have mediocre poetry, which is disdained, unhonored, and worthless.
1580
Source: Essays
It may be that [my Essays] will hardly please the common minds [...] nor the superior intellects [...]; the former not understanding them enough, the latter understanding them too much.
1580
Source: Essays
The world is nothing but variety and dissimilarity.
1580
Source: Essays
There is as much diversity in vice as in everything else.
1580
Source: Essays
Everyone is inclined to aggravate their neighbor's sin and to mitigate their own.
1580
Source: Essays
Socrates said that the main role of wisdom is to teach what is good and what is evil, and to make their difference understood.
1580
Source: Essays
Other vices alter our good sense; this one [drunkenness] annihilates it and causes a general disturbance to the body.
1580
Source: Essays
The worst of all states for man is that in which he no longer has knowledge of himself and no longer governs himself.
1580
Source: Essays
By taste and by temperament, I detest this vice [drunkenness], [...] I find it shameful and stupid, and yet less bad and less harmful than the others which [...] do more direct harm to society.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] perhaps we are much more inclined than our fathers to licentiousness, and wine and women are two things that, carried to excess, are harmful to one another.
1580
Source: Essays
He was, to an unheard-of degree, a slave to his word, and of such a conscience in matters of religion that he was inclined more towards superstition than the opposite.
1580
Source: Essays
I cannot, however, understand how one can still find satisfaction in drinking when one is no longer thirsty and in creating, by imagination, an artificial appetite that is against nature.
1580
Source: Essays
Plato forbids children to drink wine before the age of eighteen and to get drunk before forty.
1580
Source: Essays
However wise one may suppose him, the wise man is ultimately only a man; and what is more frail, more miserable, more akin to nothingness than man?
1580
Source: Essays
Wisdom does not overcome the conditions that nature has imposed on us.
1580
Source: Essays
Let the wise man therefore be content to contain and moderate his inclinations; to annihilate them is not in his power.
1580
Source: Essays
All human actions that are out of the ordinary are liable to be taken in a bad light, especially since we no more accept what is above what we approve of than what is below it.
1580
Source: Essays
Anticipating the winter storms, [a Gardener] had moved a great many artichokes [...] into a small covered shed, hoping to keep them good and fresh for two or three months.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
They were leading [ostriches] on foot, and say that their beasts tired less than they did.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
[In this city], they receive anyone who wishes to enter at any hour of the night, whether on foot or on horseback, provided he gives his name.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
The gatekeeper, from his bed in his nightshirt, by means of a certain device he pulls and pushes, opens the gate more than a hundred good paces from his room.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
The stranger finds himself in a room, and on his whole path sees no one to speak to.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
[The stranger] finds a brass vessel [...] there he places the money he owes for his passage. [...] if [the gatekeeper] is not satisfied, he leaves him there to soak until the next day.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
It is one of the most ingenious things one can see; the Queen of England sent an Ambassador expressly to ask the Seigniory to reveal the use of these devices: they say they refused him.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
Under this gatehouse, there is a large cellar to house five hundred horses under cover, to receive help or to send to war without the knowledge of the city's common folk.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
They have a hired whitewasher to immediately go over anything that has been blackened on their walls.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
Few meals pass where you are not presented with sugared almonds & boxes of jams; the most excellent bread possible.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
M. de Montaigne complained greatly about leaving, being a day's journey from the Danube without seeing it.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
M. de Montaigne was very keen to avoid retracing his steps.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
One can estimate the expense at four livres per day for a man and a horse, and forty sous for a man on foot, at the least.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
Everywhere in that country they chop turnips and swedes with the same care and haste as they thresh wheat.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
They had gone hunting, ladies and all, on the day we were there.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
This perfect friendship [...] is indivisible: each one gives himself so wholly to his friend that he has nothing left to distribute elsewhere.
1580
Source: Essays
The one and principal friendship absolves one of all other obligations.
1580
Source: Essays
Since the day I lost him, [...] I do but languish; and [...] it seems to me I am but half myself.
1580
Source: Essays
We can grasp virtue in such a way that it becomes vicious, if we embrace it with a desire too harsh and violent.
1580
Source: Essays
The archer who overshoots the target misses just as much as the one who falls short.
1580
Source: Essays
Is man not a miserable creature? Scarcely is it in his power [...] to taste a single pleasure whole and pure, yet he still takes pains to curtail it by argument.
1580
Source: Essays
I should wish [...] to speak to people who have experienced what I describe. But, knowing how [...] rare such a friendship is, I do not expect to find any good judge of it.
1580
Source: Essays
Everyone calls barbarism what is not their own custom.
1580
Source: Essays
We have no other criterion for truth and reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the country we are in.
1580
Source: Essays
I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead, in tearing by tortures [...] a body still full of feeling [...] than in roasting and eating him after he has passed.
1580
Source: Essays
We may therefore well call them barbarians, in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.
1580
Source: Essays
We must beware of clinging to vulgar opinions, and must judge things by the way of reason, not by the common voice.
1580
Source: Essays
I fear we have eyes bigger than our bellies, and more curiosity than we have capacity. We embrace everything, but we clasp only wind.
1580
Source: Essays
The estimation and the value of a man consist in the heart and in the will; there lies his true honor: valor is the firmness [...] of the courage and of the soul.
1580
Source: Essays
I do not have that common error of judging another by my own measure. [...] I more easily accept the difference than the resemblance in us.
1580
Source: Essays
If pain is violent, it is short; if it is long, it is light.
1580
Source: Essays
What makes us suffer pain with such impatience is that we are not accustomed to take our main contentment in the soul, [...] the sole and sovereign mistress of our condition.
1580
Source: Essays
It is easy to see that what sharpens pain and pleasure in us is the point of our mind.
1580
Source: Essays
Just as the enemy becomes more bitter when we flee, so pain prides itself on seeing us tremble beneath it. It will be far more compliant with one who stands up to it.
1580
Source: Essays
Opinion is a powerful, bold, and immeasurable party.
1580
Source: Essays
Truly, it is not want, but rather abundance, that produces avarice.
1580
Source: Essays
Everyone is well or ill according to how he finds himself. Not the one whom others believe to be so, but the one who believes it of himself, is content.
1580
Source: Essays
Fortune does us neither good nor harm; she only offers us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as it pleases.
1580
Source: Essays
To judge of things great and high, we must have a soul of the same kind; otherwise we attribute to them the vice that is our own.
1580
Source: Essays
It most often happens [...] that everyone chooses rather to discourse on another's trade than on his own, thinking it is so much new reputation acquired.
1580
Source: Essays
The thing I am most afraid of is fear.
1580
Source: Essays
To philosophize is nothing other than to prepare oneself for death.
1580
Source: Essays
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty. He who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.
1580
Source: Essays
The continual work of your life is to build death. You are in death while you are in life.
1580
Source: Essays
The utility of living is not in its duration, but in its use: some have lived long, and yet lived little.
1580
Source: Essays
To fear common perils [...], not to dare what so many souls of all natures and the entire people dare, is the mark of a cowardly and base heart beyond all measure.
1580
Source: Essays
Death is more abject, more languishing, more painful in a bed than in a fight.
1580
Source: Essays
He who is made to bear valiantly the accidents of ordinary life does not need to augment his courage to become a soldier.
1580
Source: Essays
If my body behaved as much to my liking as my soul, we would walk a little more at our ease.
1580
Source: Essays
I do not regret any more not having to last as long and without more decrepitude than an oak tree.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a great step towards freedom to know how to regulate one's stomach.
1580
Source: Essays
[My father] wanted me to be inclined to look more towards those who extend their arms to me, than those who turn their backs.
1580
Source: Essays
The most usual and commonly followed way of life is the preferable one; all singularity seems to me to be avoided.
1580
Source: Essays
What! Have you not lived? That is not only your essential occupation, but the one that makes you someone.
1580
Source: Essays
The greatest, most glorious masterpiece of man is to live appropriately.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no science so arduous as to know how to live this life well and naturally; and of our maladies the most savage is to despise existence.
1580
Source: Essays
Intemperance is the plague of pleasure; temperance is not its scourge, it is its seasoning.
1580
Source: Essays
People haunted by this idea of sacrificing the body to the soul, [...] of ceasing to be but men, are mad; it is not into angels that they transform, but into beasts.
1580
Source: Essays
To know how to loyally enjoy what one is, is the absolute and, so to speak, divine perfection.
1580
Source: Essays
The most beautiful lives are, in my opinion, those that fit the general model of human life, [...] from which, above all, miracle and extravagance are excluded.
1580
Source: Essays
Political states are subject to the same vicissitudes and accidents as the human body.
1580
Source: Essays
Just like individuals, kingdoms and republics are born, flourish, and decline when old age reaches them.
1580
Source: Essays
Since nothing is stable in us, a health too flourishing [...] is to be contained and weakened with art, for fear [...] that it results in too sudden a backward movement which causes disorders.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] idleness, mother of corruption [...].
1580
Source: Essays
It must be agreed that a foreign war is a lesser evil than a civil war; but I do not believe that God is favorable to an enterprise so iniquitous as to pick a quarrel with others [...] for our own convenience.
1580
Source: Essays
The weakness of our condition forces us to resort, for a good end, to bad means.
1580
Source: Essays
If it is indispensable to transgress the laws of humanity, it is more excusable to do so in the interest of the soul's health than that of the body.
1580
Source: Essays
It was not enough that they should fight and that the combat should end fatally in their death; it was also necessary that they should do it with courage.
1580
Source: Essays
[The gladiators] would offer their throat to his sword and present themselves to his blows.
1580
Source: Essays
[The gladiators never let] slip a word showing weakness or imploring pity, turn their back, or make even a movement that could make them suspected of cowardice.
1580
Source: Essays
[The concept...] would seem very strange and incredible to me, if we were not accustomed to seeing, every day in our wars, so many myriads of foreigners engaging their blood and their lives for money in the service of quarrels in which they have no interest.
1580
Source: Essays
The ordinary birth of things is imperfect; they increase and strengthen as they grow.
1580
Source: Essays
Having had none before him whom he could imitate, he has had none after him who could imitate him.
1580
Source: Essays
He is the only author in the world who has never wearied nor disgusted men, always showing himself to readers as something new, and always flourishing with new grace.
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing that lives on the lips of men like his name and his works [...], which perhaps never were.
1580
Source: Essays
It is impossible to conduct such great movements according to the rules of justice. Such people must be judged as a whole, by the ultimate end of their actions.
1580
Source: Essays
[A great man] had his virtues from Nature, his vices from Fortune.
1580
Source: Essays
Never did a man know so much, and speak so little.
1580
Source: Essays
[Morals and conscience], which alone truly marks what we are, and which I alone weigh against all the others together.
1580
Source: Essays
In this man alone, it is a virtue and sufficiency that is full and equal throughout, which in all the offices of human life leaves nothing to be desired of itself.
1580
Source: Essays
I know of no form or fortune of man that I regard with so much honour and love.
1580
Source: Essays
For a man who is not a saint, but what we call an honorable man, of civil and common morals, of a moderate stature: the richest life, that I know of, to be lived among the living [...].
1580
Source: Essays
The sweetest contentment he had in his whole life [...] was the pleasure he had given his father and his mother [...], preferring their pleasure to his own.
1580
Source: Essays
He did not think it was permissible, even to recover the liberty of his country, to kill a man without a proper hearing.
1580
Source: Essays
In a battle, one had to avoid encountering a friend who was on the opposing side, and spare him.
1580
Source: Essays
Victory following him like his shadow wherever he led, the prosperity of his country also died when he died, just as it was born through him.
1580
Source: Essays
Having to choose, to perpetuate one's memory, between a misshapen and sickly child or a foolish and inept book, one would resign oneself to the first of these misfortunes rather than the second.
1580
Source: Essays
If it had been proposed to Saint Augustine to annihilate his writings... or to lose his children..., would it not have been an impiety on his part not to sacrifice the latter?
1580
Source: Essays
I truly do not know if I would not much rather have brought into the world a perfect work, born of my commerce with the Muses, than a child from my relations with my wife.
1580
Source: Essays
[My work] may know things that I no longer know, hold things from me that I myself no longer remember.
1580
Source: Essays
And if I needed to borrow from [my work], I would have to do so as a stranger would.
1580
Source: Essays
If I am wiser than [my book], it is richer than I.
1580
Source: Essays
There are few men who cultivate poetry who would not find themselves better off being the father of the Aeneid than of the most handsome boy in Rome [...].
1580
Source: Essays
[Poets] would suffer more from the loss of their work than from that of their children.
1580
Source: Essays
Of all those who produce, the poet is, in particular, the most inclined to fall in love with his works.
1580
Source: Essays
Epaminondas boasted of leaving as his only posterity daughters who would one day bring honor to their father (these were the two brilliant victories he had won [...]).
1580
Source: Essays
Alexander and Caesar never wished to sacrifice the fame they owe to their glorious conquests for the advantage of having children who would have been their heirs [...].
1580
Source: Essays
I doubt... that any master sculptor... would have preferred the preservation... of the children nature had given him, to that of his works... brought to perfection.
1580
Source: Essays
These unnatural passions... are sometimes found to the same degree in this other kind of kinship [with our creations].
1580
Source: Essays
He touches the ivory, and the ivory, forgetting its natural hardness, yields and softens under his fingers.
1580
Source: Essays
Often, far above our heads, we see a beautiful village; and beneath our feet, as if at the Antipodes, another [...]. It does not seem to me that any painting can represent such a rich landscape.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
Because I had slapped our coachman, which is a great excess according to the custom of the country, witness the coachman who killed the Prince of Trésignano.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
I noticed there a Palace of cut stone, all carved on the outside in square diamond points; [...] this form of construction is pleasant to the eye.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
We could well feel that we were on the road to Loreto, so full were the roads of people coming and going; and several [...] companies of rich people making the journey on foot, dressed as pilgrims.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
There is more appearance of religion there than in any other place I have seen.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
Whatever is lost there, [...] worthy not only of being picked up, but of being stolen, [...] he who finds it, places it in a certain public place destined for that purpose; and whoever wants to take it back, takes it from there, without any questions asked.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
While sleeping, all of a sudden, he dreams that he is cured [...]; he awakens, cries out that he is cured, calls his people, gets up, walks about, which he had never done since his illness.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
This city is famous above all others in Italy: for beautiful women, we saw none, only very ugly ones; and to me who inquired, [...] he told me that their time had passed.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
Almost throughout Italy, they sift flour with wheels, where one baker does more work in an hour than we do in four.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
They say there are as many rooms as there are days in the year [...]. Through one door, you often see twenty other doors that follow in one direction, and as many or more in the other.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
I saw there the life-like effigy of Pico della Mirandola. A [...] very handsome, beardless face, [...] a longish nose, gentle eyes, [...] blond hair, falling to his shoulders, and a strange attire.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
What a vain thing medicine is.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
The people eat 'wooden bread': thus they call chestnut bread in a proverb, which is their main harvest.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
The people among themselves are all divided into the French and Spanish parties [...]. The women and men of our party wear bouquets of flowers on their right ear [...]; the Spaniards on the other side.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
Free nations do not have the distinction of ranks of people like others do; and even the lowliest have I know not what of the lordly in their manners.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
The touchstone of a good marriage, and its true test, concerns the time the union lasts: if it has been consistently sweet, loyal, and comfortable.
1580
Source: Essays
They rather prove thereby that they only love them when they are dead.
1580
Source: Essays
Their grieving is odious to the living and vain to the dead. We will gladly excuse them for laughing afterward, provided they laugh with us during our lives.
1580
Source: Essays
Is it not enough to make one rise from the dead out of spite, that she who spat in my face while I was, should come to rub my feet when I begin to be no more?
1580
Source: Essays
This ceremonious demeanor looks not so much backward as forward; it is more an acquisition than a payment.
1580
Source: Essays
Do not think, my friend, that the pains I see you suffer do not touch me as much as they do you [...]. I want to accompany you in the cure as I have in the sickness.
1580
Source: Essays
Do what you will, you may indeed make my death worse, but you cannot keep me from dying.
1580
Source: Essays
Do thus, Paetus [...]. Look, Paetus, it did not hurt me.
1580
Source: Essays
Since I can leave you nothing else [...], I leave you at least the most beautiful thing I have, that is, the image of my character and my life.
1580
Source: Essays
Where are these fine precepts of philosophy? What has become of the provisions we have made for so many years against the accidents of fortune?
1580
Source: Essays
No, Seneca, I am not one to leave you without my company [...]; I would not have you think that the virtuous examples of your life have not yet taught me how to die well.
1580
Source: Essays
Whoever would build a complete body of [stories] would need to supply nothing of his own but the connection, like the solder of another metal.
1580
Source: Essays
We must hold the soul between our teeth, since the law of living, for good men, is not as long as they please, but as long as they ought.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a testimony of greatness of courage to return to life for the consideration of another.
1580
Source: Essays
I have forced myself to live, and it is sometimes magnanimity to live.
1580
Source: Essays
They sought to recommend not their words, but their deeds.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a kind of mockery and insult to promote a man for qualities unbecoming of his rank, even if they are otherwise laudable [...].
1580
Source: Essays
To appear so excellent in these less necessary skills is to produce evidence against oneself of having misspent one's leisure and study [...].
1580
Source: Essays
It is not so much about elevating the words as it is about conveying the meaning, all the more poignantly the more obliquely it is done.
1580
Source: Essays
I find little to choose between knowing only how to speak badly, and knowing nothing but how to speak well.
1580
Source: Essays
[Good writings] teach us not how to speak well, but how to do well.
1580
Source: Essays
Fie on the eloquence that leaves us with a desire for itself, not for the things it describes!
1580
Source: Essays
To negotiate with the wind as others do, I could only do in a dream [...].
1580
Source: Essays
I have neither the faculty nor the taste for these long offers of affection and service; [...] I dislike saying much beyond what I believe.
1580
Source: Essays
I hate to death the sense of being a flatterer, which makes me naturally resort to a dry, blunt, and crude speech [...].
1580
Source: Essays
I honor most those whom I honor least; and where my soul walks with great joy, I forget the steps of decorum.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems to me they should read it in my heart, and that the expression of my words does an injustice to my thought.
1580
Source: Essays
Those [letters] that cost me the most are those that are worth the least; when I drag them out, it is a sign that I am not in them.
1580
Source: Essays
I willingly begin without a plan; the first stroke produces the second.
1580
Source: Essays
[Caesar's work] should be the breviary of every man of war, as being the true and sovereign model of the military art.
1580
Source: Essays
The deception is not so great to find the enemy in reality weaker than one had hoped, as it is to find them, after judging them weak by reputation, truly very strong.
1580
Source: Essays
He accustomed his soldiers above all to obey simply, without meddling in controlling or discussing their captain's plans...
1580
Source: Essays
The most sovereign part of a captain is the science of seizing opportunities at the right moment, and diligence.
1580
Source: Essays
He required no other virtue in his soldiers than valor, nor did he punish any other vices than mutiny and disobedience.
1580
Source: Essays
Speaking to them, he called them by the name of comrades [...]. To this courtesy, however, Caesar mixed a great severity in repressing them.
1580
Source: Essays
He was accustomed to saying that he preferred a victory guided by counsel over one won by force.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems to me I read in several of his exploits a certain resolution to perish, in order to flee the shame of being vanquished.
1580
Source: Essays
He used to say that great undertakings must be executed, not consulted upon.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not the number of men, but the number of good men, that creates the advantage, the rest serving more as a hindrance than a help.
1580
Source: Essays
He who commands a whole country should never commit himself [...], otherwise he must keep himself free, to have the means to provide generally for all parts of his government.
1580
Source: Essays
He esteemed that he should not easily hazard the honor of so many victories, which a single misfortune could make him lose.
1580
Source: Essays
There can be some just moderation in this desire for glory, and some satiety in this appetite, as in others.
1580
Source: Essays
Passion commands us much more vividly than reason.
1580
Source: Essays
Caesar's soldiers were accustomed to giving life to others, not receiving it.
1580
Source: Essays
One proceeds badly when one opposes a passion: for the opposition [...] stings and engages one further into sadness.
1580
Source: Essays
The first greetings of the physician to his patient must be gracious, cheerful, and pleasant. Never did a grim and surly physician succeed in his work.
1580
Source: Essays
When doctors cannot purge a malady, they divert it [...] to another, less dangerous part. This is also the most common prescription for the diseases of the soul.
1580
Source: Essays
It belongs to Socrates alone to meet death with an ordinary face, to familiarize himself with it and make a game of it.
1580
Source: Essays
They flee the struggle: they turn their consideration away from death, as one distracts children while giving them a lancet's prick.
1580
Source: Essays
He who dies in the melee, arms in hand, does not then study death, he neither feels nor considers it: the heat of battle carries him away.
1580
Source: Essays
We are always thinking of something else: the hope of a better life stops and supports us, or the hope of our children's worth, or the future glory of our name [...].
1580
Source: Essays
However perfect men they may be, they are still, and heavily so, men.
1580
Source: Essays
A sour imagination holds me: I find it quicker to change it than to tame it [...]. Variation always relieves, dissolves, and dissipates.
1580
Source: Essays
If I cannot fight it, I escape it; and in fleeing it, I mislead, I use cunning.
1580
Source: Essays
A small thing diverts and distracts us, for a small thing holds us.
1580
Source: Essays
The memory of a farewell, of an action, of a particular grace, of a final recommendation, afflicts us.
1580
Source: Essays
I see death nonchalantly when I see it universally, as the end of life. I rebuke it in the mass; in detail, it ransacks me.
1580
Source: Essays
How many times do we entangle our spirit with anger or sadness through such shadows, and insert ourselves into fantastical passions, which alter both our soul and body?
1580
Source: Essays
To give up one's life for a dream is to value it for exactly what it is.
1580
Source: Essays
Contradictions [...] do not offend or alter me; they only rouse and exercise me.
1580
Source: Essays
When I am contradicted, it arouses my attention, not my wrath; I move toward the one who contradicts me, who instructs me.
1580
Source: Essays
The cause of truth ought to be the common cause for both sides.
1580
Source: Essays
I feast upon and cherish truth in whichever hand I find it, and stretch out my conquered arms to it from afar as I see it approach.
1580
Source: Essays
Obstinacy and heat in opinion are the surest proof of stupidity.
1580
Source: Essays
We are born to seek truth; to possess it belongs to a greater power.
1580
Source: Essays
The world is but a school of inquiry. The prize is not for who hits the mark, but for who runs the finest course.
1580
Source: Essays
My humor is to consider the form as much as the substance, the advocate as much as the cause [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two; but as to which is better, I can say nothing.
1580
Source: Essays
Nothing puts a state under such pressure as innovation: change alone gives form to injustice and tyranny.
1580
Source: Essays
The oldest and best-known evil is always more bearable than a new and untried one.
1580
Source: Essays
We are prone to be displeased with the present condition. But I maintain, nonetheless, that to desire [...] another form of government is a vice and a folly.
1580
Source: Essays
The world is unfit to cure itself; it is so impatient with what is oppressing it that it aims only to get rid of it, without considering the cost.
1580
Source: Essays
I add, but I do not correct. [...] My book is always one.
1580
Source: Essays
I find nothing so costly as that which is given to me and for which my will remains mortgaged by title of gratitude [...].
1580
Source: Essays
I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, and ordinary fashion, without striving or artifice: for it is myself that I portray.
1580
Source: Essays
Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book: there's no reason for you to spend your leisure on such a frivolous and vain subject.
1580
Source: Essays
Truly, man is a wonderfully vain, diverse, and wavering subject. It is difficult to found a constant and uniform judgment upon him.
1580
Source: Essays
I am one of the most exempt from this passion [of sadness], and I neither like nor esteem it [...] they dress wisdom, virtue, and conscience in it: a foolish and monstrous ornament.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] the force of a grief, to be extreme, must stun the entire soul, and hinder its freedom of action [...]
1580
Source: Essays
We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future, and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall be no more.
1580
Source: Essays
He who knows himself no longer takes another's business for his own: he loves and cultivates himself before all else: he refuses superfluous occupations and useless thoughts and proposals.
1580
Source: Essays
We owe subjection and obedience equally to all Kings, for it respects their office: but we owe esteem, as well as affection, only to their virtue.
1580
Source: Essays
The soul that has no established goal loses itself: for, as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere.
1580
Source: Essays
In truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are men, and we hold to one another, only by our word.
1580
Source: Essays
If, like truth, a lie had only one face, we would be on better terms. [...] But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and an infinite field.
1580
Source: Essays
Men [...] are tormented by the opinions they have of things, and not by the things themselves.
1580
Source: Essays
Any opinion is strong enough to be espoused at the price of one's life.
1580
Source: Essays
What is the use of the knowledge of things, if we lose our rest and tranquility for it [...] and if it makes us in a worse condition than Pyrrho's pig?
1580
Source: Essays
It is in our power, if not to annihilate it [pain], at least to lessen it by patience, and though the body should be moved by it, still to maintain the soul and reason in a good state.
1580
Source: Essays
Moderation is needed, even in the practice of virtue.
1580
Source: Essays
Virtue can become vice if we bring to it a desire that is too sharp and too violent.
1580
Source: Essays
I love temperate natures that keep to a middle course; to exceed the measure, even in good, [...] astonishes me.
1580
Source: Essays
The archer who overshoots the target misses his mark, just as the one who falls short.
1580
Source: Essays
My sight is troubled [...] when, all at once, I am in full light or I fall into darkness.
1580
Source: Essays
Practiced with moderation, [philosophy] is agreeable and convenient; but if one oversteps its limits, it ends up making a man savage and vicious.
1580
Source: Essays
Carried to excess, philosophy enslaves our natural frankness and [...] leads us astray from the beautiful, level path that nature traces for us.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no pleasure so legitimate that its excess and intemperance are not blameworthy.
1580
Source: Essays
Is man not a very unhappy creature? There is scarcely a pleasure [...] of which nature concedes him the full and entire enjoyment.
1580
Source: Essays
He is not miserable enough; art and study must still come and increase his misery.
1580
Source: Essays
Human wisdom quite foolishly contrives to restrict the number and sweetness of the pleasures we can taste.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] our doctors, those of the mind as well as those of the body, [...] consider only torment, pain, and suffering as able to bring about a cure.
1580
Source: Essays
The rule that everything is cured by its opposite is at fault here: it is evil that cures evil.
1580
Source: Essays
[Pleasure] must be a restrained, serious pleasure, tinged with some severity; it must be an act of particularly prudent and conscientious voluptuousness.
1580
Source: Essays
The true field and subject of imposture are unknown things.
1580
Source: Essays
Strangeness itself lends credit.
1580
Source: Essays
Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known, nor are any people so confident as those who tell us fables.
1580
Source: Essays
I find it wrong, what I see in practice, to seek to support our religion by the good fortune and prosperity of our undertakings.
1580
Source: Essays
Our belief has enough other foundations without authorizing it by events.
1580
Source: Essays
For the people accustomed to these plausible arguments [...], there is a danger that when events turn contrary, their faith will be shaken.
1580
Source: Essays
It is [...] with the same mouth to blow hot and cold.
1580
Source: Essays
It would be better to discourse upon the true foundations of truth.
1580
Source: Essays
It is difficult to bring divine things to our scale without them suffering some loss.
1580
Source: Essays
The good have something other to hope for, and the wicked something other to fear, than the fortunes or misfortunes of this world.
1580
Source: Essays
They mock themselves, those who wish to make use [of divine things] according to human reason.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a conflict that is decided more by the weapons of memory than by those of reason.
1580
Source: Essays
We must be content with the light that the Sun is pleased to communicate to us through its rays.
1580
Source: Essays
Whoever raises his eyes to take a greater [light] [...], let him not find it strange if, as penalty for his presumption, he loses his sight.
1580
Source: Essays
The world is nothing but a perpetual motion; everything in it is constantly stirring [...] stillness itself is merely a less conspicuous movement.
1580
Source: Essays
I cannot fix the object I portray: it stumbles and reels [...] I do not paint its being, I paint its passage.
1580
Source: Essays
If my soul could find a foothold, I would not hesitate [...] but it is forever seeking its way and putting itself to the test.
1580
Source: Essays
Within every man is to be found the whole of mankind.
1580
Source: Essays
If the world complains that I speak too much of myself, I complain that it does not even think of itself.
1580
Source: Essays
Malice absorbs the greater part of its own venom and poisons itself.
1580
Source: Essays
Doing good always provides [...] that generous pride which is the companion of a good conscience.
1580
Source: Essays
To seek in the approval of others the reward for virtuous actions is to rely on too uncertain a measure.
1580
Source: Essays
Only you know if you are cowardly and cruel [...] others do not see you; they guess at you from uncertain conjectures.
1580
Source: Essays
One does not uproot our original qualities; one only manages to conceal them, to hide them.
1580
Source: Essays
The swiftest way to glory should be to do for conscience's sake what we do for glory's sake.
1580
Source: Essays
The soul's merit lies not in rising high, but in proceeding in an orderly manner; its greatness is revealed not in greatness, but in the ordinary course of life.
1580
Source: Essays
If I were to live my life over again, I would live it as I have lived it; I do not regret the past, and I do not fear the future.
1580
Source: Essays
My reason operates much more freely when things go my way.
1580
Source: Essays
One sees no souls, or very few, that in growing old do not acquire a sour and musty smell.
1580
Source: Essays
I am especially distrustful of people when they hold a high position or enjoy popular favor [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Most men are rich with the knowledge of others; it can very well happen that someone quotes a beautiful sentence [...] without grasping its full scope.
1580
Source: Essays
We do not assimilate everything we borrow. [...] We must not always yield to these expressions, however right and beautiful they may seem.
1580
Source: Essays
When [people] confine themselves to expressing their judgments in generalities [...] and they happen to be right, consider whether it is not the effect of chance.
1580
Source: Essays
These judgments conceived in general terms, which are so frequently used, mean nothing.
1580
Source: Essays
One must not only listen to what each person says, but also examine what they think and why they think it.
1580
Source: Essays
I daily hear fools say things that are not foolish; what they say is right, it remains to be seen to what extent they realize it.
1580
Source: Essays
To correct a fool in the hope of rectifying his judgment is a lost cause.
1580
Source: Essays
Nothing in foolishness vexes me so much as to see it pleased with itself, [...] more than reason can ever feel.
1580
Source: Essays
Obstinacy and an overly ardent opinion are certain proofs of stupidity.
1580
Source: Essays
When I want to judge someone, I ask them to what extent they are satisfied with themselves, to what degree what they say or think pleases them.
1580
Source: Essays
Not daring to speak frankly of oneself indicates a lack of courage.
1580
Source: Essays
Not only do I dare to speak of myself, but I speak only of myself; I go astray when I speak of anything else, I depart from my subject.
1580
Source: Essays
Favors are pleasant as long as one knows one can repay them; but if they exceed our means [...], they become odious to us.
1580
Source: Essays
[A good book] is not a book to be read, it is to be studied and learned.
1580
Source: Essays
It is difficult for reasoning and instruction [...] to be powerful enough to put us in a position to act if, in addition, we do not exercise and shape our soul through practice.
1580
Source: Essays
As for death, we can only try it once, and when it comes, we are all but apprentices to it.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems, however, that there is [...] a possibility of familiarizing ourselves with death, of trying it out somewhat. If we cannot reach it, we can approach it, we can reconnoiter it.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not without reason that sleep is compared to it [...]. How easily, being awake, we fall asleep; do we not lose consciousness of the light and of ourselves almost without noticing it!
1580
Source: Essays
Many things seem greater in imagination than they are in effect.
1580
Source: Essays
I have found that when I was in health, I pitied the sick much more than I find myself to be pitied when I am one; and that the force of my apprehension enhanced the essence and truth of the matter by almost half.
1580
Source: Essays
This is not my doctrine, it is my study: and it is not another's lesson, it is my own.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no description as difficult as the description of oneself, nor any as useful.
1580
Source: Essays
For several years now, I have had only myself as the target of my thoughts, I control and study only myself. And if I study anything else, it is to immediately apply it to myself, or within myself, to be more precise.
1580
Source: Essays
My trade and my art is to live.
1580
Source: Essays
I display myself entire: it is a skeleton, where at a glance the veins, muscles, tendons appear, each part in its place. [...] It is not my deeds that I write; it is me, it is my essence.
1580
Source: Essays
To say less of oneself than is true is folly, not modesty: to value oneself at less than one's worth is cowardice and pusillanimity [...]. No virtue is aided by falsehood.
1580
Source: Essays
Pride resides in the thought: the tongue can have but a very slight part in it.
1580
Source: Essays
No particular quality will make a man proud who takes into account [...] so many other imperfect and weak qualities within him, and, in the end, the nothingness of the human condition.
1580
Source: Essays
He who knows himself thus, let him boldly make himself known through his own mouth.
1580
Source: Essays
By diverse means, one arrives at a similar end.
1580
Source: Essays
The most common way to soften hearts [...] is to move them to pity through submission: However, bravery and constancy, complete opposites, have sometimes served the same purpose.
1580
Source: Essays
The consideration and respect for such a notable virtue first blunted the edge of his anger.
1580
Source: Essays
I have a marvelous weakness for mercy and gentleness.
1580
Source: Essays
In my opinion, I would yield more naturally to compassion than to esteem.
1580
Source: Essays
Pity [is a] vicious passion for the Stoics: they want us to help the afflicted, but not to bend and commiserate with them.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] to yield to the mere reverence of the holy image of virtue is the effect of a strong and unbending soul, holding in affection and honor a masculine and obstinate vigor.
1580
Source: Essays
However, in less generous souls, astonishment and admiration can produce a similar effect.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] they were one day happier than he was.
1580
Source: Essays
Truly, man is a wonderfully vain, diverse, and undulating subject.
1580
Source: Essays
It is difficult to found a constant and uniform judgment upon him.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] if I cannot wrench a word from you, I will at least wrench a groan.
1580
Source: Essays
Could it be that boldness was so common to him that, by not admiring it, he respected it less?
1580
Source: Essays
No one was seen so beaten by wounds that he did not try in his last breath to take revenge still [...] and console his own death in the death of an enemy.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] Either of these two means would easily win me over. For I have a marvelous weakness for mercy [...].
1580
Source: Essays
If to philosophize is to doubt, [...] then to trifle and fantasize, as I do, must be to doubt all the more.
1580
Source: Essays
What can those suffer who do not fear death?
1580
Source: Essays
How could a man live free? By despising death.
1580
Source: Essays
The most favorable gift Nature has given us [...] is to have left us the key to the fields.
1580
Source: Essays
Life depends on the will of others, death on our own.
1580
Source: Essays
It is weakness to give in to evils, but it is madness to foster them.
1580
Source: Essays
There is much more constancy in wearing out the chain that holds us than in breaking it.
1580
Source: Essays
It is the role of cowardice, not of virtue, to go and hide in a hollow [...] to avoid the blows of Fortune.
1580
Source: Essays
Sometimes the flight from death makes us run to it.
1580
Source: Essays
It is against Nature for us to despise ourselves and treat ourselves with neglect.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a similar vanity to desire to be something other than what we are.
1580
Source: Essays
He avoids war for naught, who cannot enjoy peace; and he flees pain for naught, who has no means to savor rest.
1580
Source: Essays
To live is sometimes constancy and valor.
1580
Source: Essays
Not all inconveniences are worth wanting to die to avoid them.
1580
Source: Essays
What reason would not achieve in each individual, it achieves in all: the ardor of society carries away private judgments.
1580
Source: Essays
It is right to make a great distinction between the faults that come from our weakness and those that come from our malice.
1580
Source: Essays
[For faults of malice,] we have knowingly set ourselves against the rules of reason that nature has imprinted in us.
1580
Source: Essays
[For faults of weakness,] it seems we can call nature herself to witness for having left us in such imperfection and failure.
1580
Source: Essays
Many people have thought that we can only be held accountable for what we do against our conscience.
1580
Source: Essays
As for cowardice, it is certain that the most common way to punish it is by shame and ignominy.
1580
Source: Essays
[One must hope] to be able to make use [of those who have failed], having restored their courage through this shame.
1580
Source: Essays
It is to be feared that shame will drive them to despair and render them not merely cold, but enemies.
1580
Source: Essays
When there is such gross and apparent ignorance or cowardice [...] it would be right to take it as sufficient proof of wickedness and malice.
1580
Source: Essays
Men, however fair a face fortune shows them, cannot be called happy until one has seen them pass the last day of their life.
1580
Source: Essays
The uncertainty and variety of human affairs, which by a very slight movement change from one state to another, entirely different.
1580
Source: Essays
Just as storms and tempests take offense at the pride and haughtiness of our buildings, so there seem to be on high spirits envious of the grandeurs here below.
1580
Source: Essays
Fortune sometimes lies in wait for the last day of our life to show its power to overthrow in a moment what it had built over many years.
1580
Source: Essays
This very happiness of our life [...] should never be attributed to a man until he has been seen to play the last act of his comedy, and without doubt the most difficult one.
1580
Source: Essays
In all the rest there may be a mask: or these fine discourses of Philosophy are in us only for show.
1580
Source: Essays
But in this last role of death and of ourselves, there is no more pretending, one must speak plainly, one must show what is good and clean at the bottom of the pot.
1580
Source: Essays
That is why all the other actions of our life must be judged and tested by this final stroke.
1580
Source: Essays
It is the master day, it is the day that judges all the others: it is the day [...] that must judge all my past years.
1580
Source: Essays
I leave to death the test of the fruit of my studies. We shall see then whether my words come from my mouth, or from my heart.
1580
Source: Essays
I have seen many, by their death, give a good or bad reputation to their entire life.
1580
Source: Essays
We must see them die [...] before we can resolve [a man's worth].
1580
Source: Essays
There are brave and fortunate deaths.
1580
Source: Essays
In judging the life of another, I always look at how the end was borne.
1580
Source: Essays
One of the principal studies of my own life is that its end be borne well, that is to say, quietly and mutedly.
1580
Source: Essays
It was a fine invention [...] to establish certain marks, vain and worthless in themselves, to honor and reward virtue.
1580
Source: Essays
It is [...] a very good and profitable custom to find a way to recognize the worth of rare and excellent men, and to content them [...] with payments which do not burden the public at all, and which cost the Prince nothing.
1580
Source: Essays
If to a prize that ought to be simply of honor, one mixes in other commodities and riches, this mixture, instead of increasing its estimation, debases and diminishes it.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] virtue more willingly embraces and aspires to a reward that is purely its own, more glorious than useful.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] it is no wonder if virtue is less willing to receive and desire this sort of common currency than that which is its own and particular, entirely noble and generous.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] honor is a privilege that draws its principal essence from rarity; and so does virtue itself.
1580
Source: Essays
We do not notice, for a man's recommendation, that he takes care to raise his children, because it is a common action, however just it may be.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no reward for a virtue, however great it may be, that has passed into custom.
1580
Source: Essays
Since, then, these awards of honor have no other price and estimation than this, that few people enjoy them, there is no way to annihilate them but to be lavish with them.
1580
Source: Essays
There is another true, perfect, and philosophical [virtue] [...] which is a strength and assurance of the soul, despising equally all sorts of contrary accidents; equable, uniform, and constant [...].
1580
Source: Essays
No man of heart deigns to take advantage of that which he has in common with many.
1580
Source: Essays
Our nation gives to valor the first degree among the virtues, as its name shows, which comes from 'valeur' (worth).
1580
Source: Essays
It is likely that the first virtue that made its appearance among men, and which gave some an advantage over others, was this one [valor].
1580
Source: Essays
The rules for dispensing this new order would need to be extremely strict and constrained to give it authority.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] this feverish solicitude we have for the chastity of women also means that a good woman [...] means, in effect, nothing other to us than a chaste woman.
1580
Source: Essays
Since we cannot attain it, let us take revenge by speaking ill of it.
1580
Source: Essays
Flaws are to be found in all things, however beautiful and desirable they may be.
1580
Source: Essays
I find the effort to endure evils very difficult, but to be content with a modest fortune and to shun greatness, I find very little difficulty in that.
1580
Source: Essays
Ambition is never better guided by its own lights than when it takes a stray and unusual path.
1580
Source: Essays
I sharpen my courage for patience, I weaken it for desire.
1580
Source: Essays
I do not wish either to argue with a doorkeeper, [...] nor to make the crowds part in adoration where I pass: I am suited to a middle station, as much by my fortune as by my taste.
1580
Source: Essays
The harshest and most difficult job in the world, in my opinion, is to be a King worthily.
1580
Source: Essays
It is difficult to keep measure, with a power so immeasurable.
1580
Source: Essays
Superiority and inferiority, mastery and subjection, are bound to a natural envy and contention; they must perpetually pluck at each other.
1580
Source: Essays
He who does not share in the risk and difficulty can claim no interest in the honor and pleasure that follow hazardous actions.
1580
Source: Essays
This ease and slack facility of making everything bow before you is the enemy of all kinds of pleasure. That is to glide, not to walk; it is to sleep, not to live.
1580
Source: Essays
Conceive a man accompanied by omnipotence, you ruin him: he must beg of you for hindrance and resistance as an alms.
1580
Source: Essays
[The great's] good qualities are dead and lost, for they are only felt by comparison, and they are placed outside of it.
1580
Source: Essays
This quality [Royalty] stifles and consumes the other true and essential qualities.
1580
Source: Essays
Would you have him not be more learned than I, he who commands thirty legions?
1580
Source: Essays
The most common way to soften hearts [...] is to move them by submission [...]; yet bravery, constancy, and resolution, entirely contrary means, have sometimes served the same purpose.
1580
Source: Essays
The consideration and respect for such a notable virtue blunted [...] the edge of his anger.
1580
Source: Essays
I have a marvelous weakness for mercy and gentleness.
1580
Source: Essays
In my opinion, I would yield more naturally to compassion than to esteem.
1580
Source: Essays
Pity is a vicious passion to the Stoics; they want us to help the afflicted, but not to bend and sympathize with them.
1580
Source: Essays
To yield to the mere reverence of the holy image of virtue is the effect of a strong and unbending soul [...].
1580
Source: Essays
In less generous souls, astonishment and admiration can produce a similar effect.
1580
Source: Essays
He kept his courage ever constant, without losing himself, and, with a firm countenance, went on [...] proclaiming aloud the honorable and glorious cause of his death.
1580
Source: Essays
Truly, man is a wonderfully vain, diverse, and undulating subject; it is difficult to found a constant and uniform judgment upon him.
1580
Source: Essays
Truly, I shall conquer this silence, and if I cannot wrench a word from it, I shall at least wrench a groan.
1580
Source: Essays
Could it be that the strength of courage was so natural and common to him that, not admiring it, he respected it less?
1580
Source: Essays
[...] in that high-mindedness he could not bear to see [virtue] in another without the spite of an envious passion?
1580
Source: Essays
The natural impetuosity of his anger was incapable of opposition.
1580
Source: Essays
No one was seen struck down by wounds who did not try in his last breath to take revenge still, and [...] console his own death in the death of an enemy.
1580
Source: Essays
The Emperor took such great pleasure in seeing the nobility of their courage that he wept with joy and extinguished all the bitterness of his mortal enmity [...].
1580
Source: Essays
We can grasp virtue in such a way that it becomes vicious, if we embrace it with a desire too harsh and violent.
1580
Source: Essays
Those who say that there is never any excess in virtue, because it is no longer virtue if there is excess in it, are merely playing with words.
1580
Source: Essays
One can both love virtue too much, and act excessively in a just action.
1580
Source: Essays
Be not wiser than is necessary, but be wise with sobriety.
1580
Source: Essays
I like temperate and moderate natures. Immoderation towards good itself, if it does not offend me, it astonishes me [...].
1580
Source: Essays
The archer who overshoots the target is as much at fault as the one who does not reach it.
1580
Source: Essays
[Philosophy] in its excess, enslaves our natural freedom, and leads us astray [...] from the beautiful and plain path that nature has traced for us.
1580
Source: Essays
All pleasures and all gratifications are not well-placed in all people.
1580
Source: Essays
In short, there is no pleasure so just, in which excess and intemperance are not reprehensible.
1580
Source: Essays
Is man not a miserable animal? He is scarcely able [...] to taste a single whole and pure pleasure, yet he takes pains to curtail it by reasoning.
1580
Source: Essays
[Man] is not wretched enough, if by art and study he does not augment his misery.
1580
Source: Essays
Human wisdom quite foolishly plays the ingenious part in striving to reduce the number and sweetness of the pleasures that belong to us [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Marriage is a religious and devout bond: that is why the pleasure derived from it must be a restrained, serious pleasure, mixed with some severity.
1580
Source: Essays
For whom fasting would sharpen health and cheerfulness [...] it would no longer be a salutary prescription.
1580
Source: Essays
An emperor must die standing.
1580
Source: Essays
This great charge [...] of commanding so many men is not a situation in which one can remain idle.
1580
Source: Essays
Nothing can so justly disgust a subject [...] as to see their Prince give himself over to lazy and vain occupations.
1580
Source: Essays
Victories won without the master are not complete.
1580
Source: Essays
No pilot exercises his office from dry land.
1580
Source: Essays
A master should blush with shame to claim a share of a victory, having contributed only his voice and his thought.
1580
Source: Essays
A philosopher [...] should give to bodily necessities only what cannot be refused them, keeping the soul and body always busy with beautiful, great, and virtuous things.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a generous desire to wish to die usefully [...], but the effect depends not so much on our resolution as on our good fortune.
1580
Source: Essays
A thousand have resolved to conquer or to die fighting, who have failed in both.
1580
Source: Essays
There are illnesses that strike down even our desires and our knowledge.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems that blows flee from those who present themselves to them too cheerfully.
1580
Source: Essays
Who has ever lived so long and so far into death? Who has ever died so upright?
1580
Source: Essays
The most courageous attitude towards death, and the most natural, is to see it coming not only without astonishment, but without preoccupation.
1580
Source: Essays
...freely continuing the course of life, even into death itself.
1580
Source: Essays
I am one of those over whom imagination holds great sway [...]; it imposes itself on me; so I strive to escape it, for lack of power to resist it.
1580
Source: Essays
I would gladly spend my life in the company of healthy and cheerful people; the sight of others' anguish has a painfully physical effect on me.
1580
Source: Essays
For some condemned men, fear outruns the executioner's action [...], witness the one [...] who was already struck dead by the sole effect of his imagination.
1580
Source: Essays
Gallus Vibius applied himself so intensely to studying the causes and effects of madness that he lost his reason and could not recover it.
1580
Source: Essays
It is likely that it is mainly through an effect of the imagination [...] that visions, miracles, enchantments, and all supernatural events [...] find belief.
1580
Source: Essays
The woman who sleeps with a man must, at the same time as she takes off her skirt, cast off all modesty, and only return to it when she puts it back on.
1580
Source: Essays
He who, a victim of his imagination for the first time, suffers this shame [...] having started badly, feels such vexation from this accident that he is in such a state of agitation that he runs a great risk of not showing himself to better advantage in subsequent encounters.
1580
Source: Essays
It is with reason that we observe how independent [a certain] organ is of ourselves; often soliciting us very importunately when we have no need for it; failing us sometimes just as inconveniently.
1580
Source: Essays
Is there a single part of our body that does not often refuse its duty and that does not also often act against our will?
1580
Source: Essays
Does it [our will] always want what we would wish it to want? Does it not often want, when it is clear we will be harmed by it, what we forbid it to want?
1580
Source: Essays
Why do doctors, before acting, apply themselves to building their patients' confidence [...] if not so that their imagination may make up for the foreseen ineffectiveness of their remedies?
1580
Source: Essays
The reflections I offer are my own; they are based on reason, not on facts; everyone can add to them such examples as they see fit.
1580
Source: Essays
I consider it, moreover, less hazardous to write about the past than about the present, because in the former case the writer merely relates events for whose authenticity others are responsible.
1580
Source: Essays
Nothing is so contrary to my style as a continuous and extended narrative; I am short-winded and, for everything I do, I must start over several times.
1580
Source: Essays
It matters little whether a fact from a distant time is told one way or another; it is less dangerous than a mistake in a medical prescription.
1580
Source: Essays
Any opposition [...] excites and [...] leads even more to sadness; one exasperates the ailment by the jealousy it feels at being thwarted.
1580
Source: Essays
When something we have said without importance is contested, we often become much more attached to it than to what would be of real interest to us.
1580
Source: Essays
It is [...] the most commonly applied remedy for the diseases of the soul: you cannot overcome them by attacking them directly, but you can divert and transform them.
1580
Source: Essays
[Some] flee the struggle, avoid looking death in the face, like children who are distracted when one wants to give them a lancet prick.
1580
Source: Essays
He who dies in the fray, weapons in hand, does not think of death [...]; the heat of battle holds him completely.
1580
Source: Essays
Our mind is always elsewhere; it is either the hope of a better life that sustains us, the future glory of our name, or the idea of being freed from the evils of this life.
1580
Source: Essays
The same wound, the same fatigue, [...] do not carry the same weight for a general as for a soldier.
1580
Source: Essays
Revenge is a sweet passion [...] natural to man and [which] has a great empire over us.
1580
Source: Essays
As soon as a painful idea takes hold of me, I find it simpler to change my train of thought, rather than to try to overcome it.
1580
Source: Essays
Time [...] is the sovereign remedy for our passions; by constantly feeding our imagination [...], it breaks down and alters the first impression, however strong it may be.
1580
Source: Essays
A trifle is enough to attract and divert our mind [...]. We hardly ever look at things as a whole; what strikes us are unimportant details.
1580
Source: Essays
I see death with indifference when I consider it the point at which life fatally ends. I brave it in a general way, but in detail I am less resolute.
1580
Source: Essays
A simple daydream, with neither body nor substance, governs and troubles our soul.
1580
Source: Essays
To give up one's life for a dream is to value life for exactly what it is worth.
1580
Source: Essays
No wisdom has managed to conceive why our imagination can arouse in us such a vivid sadness, when reality itself cannot.
1580
Source: Essays
All things have their season, the good ones and all.
1580
Source: Essays
The greatest vice [...] in us is that our desires are ceaselessly rejuvenated. We are always beginning to live again.
1580
Source: Essays
The young man must make his preparations, the old man must enjoy them.
1580
Source: Essays
We have one foot in the grave, and our appetites and pursuits are just being born.
1580
Source: Essays
The longest of my designs does not span a year: from now on, I only think of finishing.
1580
Source: Essays
I rid myself of all new hopes and enterprises; I take my final leave of all the places I am leaving.
1580
Source: Essays
In the end, this is all the relief I find in my old age, that it deadens in me several desires and cares, with which life is troubled.
1580
Source: Essays
[Old age] deadens in me the care for the course of the world, the care for riches, for greatness, for knowledge, for health, for myself.
1580
Source: Essays
This man learns to speak, when he needs to learn to be silent forever.
1580
Source: Essays
One can always continue to study, but not to be schooled.
1580
Source: Essays
What a foolish thing, an old man learning his ABCs!
1580
Source: Essays
The wise man himself sets limits to his virtue.
1580
Source: Essays
If we must study, let us pursue a study suitable to our condition, so that we can answer [...] 'To depart a better and more comfortable man.'
1580
Source: Essays
His knowledge and his courage were in this respect, above philosophy itself.
1580
Source: Essays
The loss of his life, or of his office, was all one to him.
1580
Source: Essays
Finding myself entirely destitute and empty of any other matter, I presented myself to myself as an argument and a subject.
1580
Source: Essays
Every craftsman loves his work more than he would be loved by it, if the work had feeling.
1580
Source: Essays
Things that have cost us more are dearer to us.
1580
Source: Essays
We should indeed lend a little to the simple authority of nature, but not let ourselves be tyrannically carried away by it; reason alone must guide our inclinations.
1580
Source: Essays
A true affection [...] should be born and grow with the knowledge they give us of themselves.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems that the jealousy we feel seeing them [...] enjoy the world, when we are about to leave it, makes us more sparing [...] towards them.
1580
Source: Essays
A father is truly miserable who holds his children's affection only by their need for his help, if that can be called affection.
1580
Source: Essays
One must make oneself respectable through one's virtue and competence, and lovable through one's goodness and gentleness of manners.
1580
Source: Essays
I condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul that is being raised for honor and liberty.
1580
Source: Essays
What cannot be done by reason, prudence, and skill can never be done by force.
1580
Source: Essays
I have seen no other effect of the rod than to make souls more cowardly or more maliciously stubborn.
1580
Source: Essays
Even if I could make myself feared, I would still prefer to make myself loved.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no sweeter consolation in the loss of our friends than that which comes from the knowledge of having forgotten nothing to tell them and of having had with them a perfect and complete communication.
1580
Source: Essays
Will it ever be said enough what a prize a friend is, in comparison with these civil bonds?
1580
Source: Essays
What we beget by the soul, the children of our mind, [...] are produced by a nobler part than the physical, and are more our own.
1580
Source: Essays
Sadness [...] is a foolish and ugly ornament.
1580
Source: Essays
The Italians have more fittingly called [sadness] wickedness, for it is always harmful, always senseless [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Sorrow [...] is far beyond all expression.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] faced with the impossibility of [painting] a countenance in keeping with the intensity of his sorrow, [the artist] painted him with his face covered.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] an excessive sorrow [...] must stupefy the soul to the point of taking away all its freedom of action.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] that bleak, mute, and deaf stupefaction that seizes us when the misfortunes that overwhelm us exceed what we can bear.
1580
Source: Essays
The truth is that the measure was full, and that a trifle is enough to break down one's energy and bring about this overflow of sadness.
1580
Source: Essays
It is with difficulty that at last [sorrow] recovers its voice and can express itself.
1580
Source: Essays
He who can say how much he burns, burns with but a small fire.
1580
Source: Essays
Any passion that can be reasoned with, that can be tasted and savored calmly, hardly deserves the name.
1580
Source: Essays
Light cares are loquacious, great passions are silent.
1580
Source: Essays
The surprise of an unexpected pleasure causes us a similar shock [to that of grief].
1580
Source: Essays
[...] Diodorus the dialectician [...] felt such shame from it, that he died on the spot.
1580
Source: Essays
As for me, I am little predisposed to these violent passions; by nature, I am not easily moved [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Human actions [...] so commonly contradict themselves in such a strange way that it seems impossible they should have come from the same workshop.
1580
Source: Essays
Irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent vice of our nature.
1580
Source: Essays
I find it harder to believe in consistency than in anything else, and in nothing more easily than in inconsistency.
1580
Source: Essays
Vice is nothing but irregularity and lack of measure; and consequently, it is impossible to attach consistency to it.
1580
Source: Essays
The beginning of all virtue is consultation and deliberation, and its end and perfection, consistency.
1580
Source: Essays
Our ordinary way is to follow the inclinations of our appetite [...] as the wind of circumstance carries us.
1580
Source: Essays
We float between different opinions: we want nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing consistently.
1580
Source: Essays
Not only does the wind of accidents move me [...], but I move and trouble myself by the instability of my own posture.
1580
Source: Essays
If I speak of myself in different ways, it is because I look at myself in different ways. All contradictions are to be found in me, in one way or another.
1580
Source: Essays
I have nothing to say about myself entirely, simply, and solidly [...]. 'Distinguo' [I distinguish] is the most universal member of my Logic.
1580
Source: Essays
A courageous act should not lead us to conclude that a man is valiant: he who truly was, would be so always and on all occasions.
1580
Source: Essays
No wind works for him who has no destined port.
1580
Source: Essays
We are all patchwork, and of a texture so shapeless and diverse that every piece, every moment, plays its own game.
1580
Source: Essays
There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not the part of a sound understanding to judge us simply by our outward actions: one must probe to the inside.
1580
Source: Essays
True friendship is the highest feeling in society; [...] essentially different from the common affections that resemble it.
1580
Source: Essays
In friendships born of natural obligation, our will has not been freely exercised; they are not the result of our choice.
1580
Source: Essays
Of all that is born from our free will, nothing depends on it more exclusively than affection and friendship.
1580
Source: Essays
The warmth of friendship extends to our whole being, it is universal yet temperate and always even; it is a constant and peaceful warmth [...].
1580
Source: Essays
Love, above all, is a violent desire for that which flees from us.
1580
Source: Essays
Friendship, on the contrary, rises, develops, and grows through enjoyment, because it is spiritual in essence and its practice refines the soul.
1580
Source: Essays
If I were pressed to say why I loved him, I could only reply: "Because it was he; because it was I."
1580
Source: Essays
In bonds of this nature, there is an inexplicable and fatal force that I could not define.
1580
Source: Essays
Our souls journeyed so completely together [...] that not only did I know his as my own, but I would have [...] trusted him more than myself.
1580
Source: Essays
Between friends, [...] their wills, intimately merged, are one. [...] They can neither lend nor give anything to each other.
1580
Source: Essays
Each one gives himself so entirely to his friend that he has nothing left to dispose of for others.
1580
Source: Essays
The secret I have sworn to reveal to no other, I can, without perjury, communicate to him who is not an other, who is myself.
1580
Source: Essays
The very pleasures that offer themselves to me, instead of consoling me, redouble the grief of his loss.
1580
Source: Essays
I was already so made, so accustomed to being a pair in all things, that it seems to me I am now but a half.
1580
Source: Essays
If I compare my entire life to the four years during which I was given to enjoy the sweet company of [my friend], it is but smoke.
1580
Source: Essays
I put forward shapeless and unresolved fantasies [...] not to establish the truth, but to seek it.
1580
Source: Essays
He makes use of His justice far more often than of His power, and favours us according to the reason of the former, not according to our requests.
1580
Source: Essays
We must have a clean soul, at least in the moment that we pray to Him [...] otherwise, we ourselves present Him with the rods with which to chastise us.
1580
Source: Essays
The state of a man who mixes devotion with an execrable life seems somehow more condemnable than that of a man who is consistent with himself and dissolute in every way.
1580
Source: Essays
We pray by usage and by custom: or to put it better, we read or pronounce our prayers: in the end, it is only for show.
1580
Source: Essays
What a prodigious conscience can be at rest, nurturing in the same lodging, in such a peaceful and agreeable society, both the crime and the judge?
1580
Source: Essays
How many received trades and vocations do we have, whose very essence is vicious?
1580
Source: Essays
A vexing sickness, to believe oneself so right that one is persuaded that the contrary cannot be believed.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not in passing, and tumultuously, that one must handle so serious and venerable a study. It must be a deliberate and settled action.
1580
Source: Essays
Pure ignorance, trusting entirely in others, was much more salutary and learned than this verbal and vain knowledge, the nurse of presumption and temerity.
1580
Source: Essays
Zeal partakes of divine reason and justice, conducting itself in an orderly and moderate way: but it changes into hatred and envy [...] when it is led by a human passion.
1580
Source: Essays
I propose human and my own fantasies, simply as human fantasies [...] not as decreed and regulated by celestial ordinance [...]. A matter of opinion, not a matter of faith.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems, in truth, that we use our prayers as a kind of jargon, and like those who use holy and divine words for sorcery and magical effects.
1580
Source: Essays
We must not ask that all things follow our will, but that they follow prudence.
1580
Source: Essays
Few men would dare to bring to light the secret requests they make to God.
1580
Source: Essays
Our mad curiosity amuses itself by preoccupying itself with future things, as if we did not have enough to do digesting the present ones.
1580
Source: Essays
One gains nothing by knowing the future, and it is wretched to torment oneself in vain.
1580
Source: Essays
He is master of himself and lives happily who can say each day: 'I have lived'.
1580
Source: Essays
Content with the present, let us beware of worrying about the future.
1580
Source: Essays
As for those who understand the language of birds [...] rather than their own reason, I hold that it is better to listen to them than to believe them.
1580
Source: Essays
In all governments, a good share of authority has always been left to chance.
1580
Source: Essays
Who is there that, shooting at a target all day, will not sometimes hit the mark?
1580
Source: Essays
No one takes note of their errors, as they are infinite in number [...], it is easy to promote those of their prognostications [...] which happen to come true by chance.
1580
Source: Essays
Those who perished [in the shipwreck] dedicated no paintings, and they are far greater in number.
1580
Source: Essays
In times of public turmoil, men [...] give themselves over to superstition, and seek in the observation of the stars the causes of their misfortune.
1580
Source: Essays
[The interpreters of prophecies] would be able to find in any writing whatever they wanted it to say.
1580
Source: Essays
Prophetic language is obscure, ambiguous, fantastic [...] so that posterity can apply it in whatever sense it pleases.
1580
Source: Essays
Socrates' familiar demon was probably certain inspirations that presented themselves to him, outside of his reason.
1580
Source: Essays
In a pure soul [...], it is likely that these inspirations, though bold and imprecise, were worthy of being heeded.
1580
Source: Essays
I have had [impulses] weak in reason and violent in persuasion [...] to which I let myself be carried away [...] and I have found myself so well for it, that I could almost attribute them to divine inspirations.
1580
Source: Essays
An emperor must die on his feet.
1580
Source: Essays
This great charge [...] of commanding so many men is not a situation in which one can remain idle.
1580
Source: Essays
Nothing is more likely [...] to disgust a subject from taking pains [...] than to see his prince grow accustomed to idleness.
1580
Source: Essays
Victories won without the master's presence are not complete.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no pilot who practices his trade while remaining on dry land.
1580
Source: Essays
The soul and body must always remain exclusively occupied with great, beautiful, and virtuous things.
1580
Source: Essays
They taught their children nothing [...] that they had to learn while sitting down.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a generous desire to wish for a worthy death [...] but it depends less on our resolution [...] than on our good fortune.
1580
Source: Essays
Thousands of people have set out to conquer or perish in combat, yet have achieved neither.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems that blows flee from those who expose themselves to them frankly, and usually refuse those who seek them out.
1580
Source: Essays
The most courageous and natural attitude towards death is to see it coming not only without surprise, but also without preoccupation.
1580
Source: Essays
[One must] continue to live, until [death] seizes us, without changing one's way of life.
1580
Source: Essays
I experienced there what has happened to me on many other occasions, that Imagination always goes further than reality.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
I was happy not to believe those Doctors who order one to abandon [a remedy] when it does not succeed from the very first day.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
After dinner I gave a ball for the peasant women, and I danced there myself so as not to appear too reserved.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
One does not see in free nations the same distinction of ranks [...] as among other peoples; here the lowliest have I know not what of the lordly in their manner.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
Even when asking for alms, they always mix in some word of authority: such as, 'Give me alms, will you?' or 'Give me alms, do you hear?'
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
[...] the pleasure of the ball depended not only on the movement of the feet, but also on the countenance, the air, the good manner, and the grace of the whole person.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
It is truly a pleasant and rare spectacle for us Frenchmen, to see such charming peasant women, dressed like Ladies, dancing so well [...].
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
[...] to see these peasants with a lute in hand, and for their part the shepherdesses, with Ariosto on their lips: but this is what one sees all over Italy.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
There would be too much weakness and cowardice on my part if, certain to always find myself in a situation where I might perish [...], I did not make my efforts [...] to be able to bear [death] without difficulty when the moment has come.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
The only remedy, the only rule, and the sole science for avoiding all the evils that beset man [...], is to resolve to suffer them humanely or to end them courageously and promptly.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
[...] the same thing happened to them as to those who, being too close to Notre-Dame de Lorette, rarely go there on pilgrimage [...].
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
I have not found in Italy a single good barber to shave me and do my hair.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
The square of Siena is the most beautiful to be seen in any city in Italy.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
[The Doctors], more for their own profit than for the good of the sick, have spread this opinion, that the baths had no effect on those who [...] were not very careful to medicate themselves while taking them.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
The gathering of this sort of people is, it seems to me, an image of lost liberty, which is thus renewed every year at the city's main Festival.
1774
Source: Montaigne's Travel Journal
Fortune, as if in spite, has made the vanity of these requests last to our day, and long ago caused those histories to be lost.
1580
Source: Essays
They sought to recommend not their words, but their deeds.
1580
Source: Essays
It is a kind of mockery and insult to want to value a man for qualities unbefitting his rank, however praiseworthy they may be otherwise.
1580
Source: Essays
To appear so excellent in these less necessary parts is to produce against oneself the testimony of having badly spent one's leisure and study.
1580
Source: Essays
Are you not ashamed, he said to him, to sing so well?
1580
Source: Essays
It is not so much elevating the words as demeaning the meaning.
1580
Source: Essays
I find not much to choose between knowing only how to speak ill, and knowing nothing but how to speak well.
1580
Source: Essays
Fie on the eloquence that leaves us with a desire for itself, not for things.
1580
Source: Essays
I needed [...] a certain commerce that would draw me in, that would sustain and lift me up. For to traffic with the wind, like others, I could not do, except in a dream.
1580
Source: Essays
I have neither the faculty nor the taste for these long offers of affection and service. I do not believe so much of it; and I dislike saying much more than what I believe.
1580
Source: Essays
I hate to death the scent of a flatterer. Which is why I naturally throw myself into a dry, blunt, and raw way of speaking.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems to me that they should read it in my heart, and that the expression of my words wrongs my inner conception.
1580
Source: Essays
Those [letters] that cost me the most are those that are worth the least. When I drag them out, it is a sign that I am not in them.
1580
Source: Essays
I gladly begin without a plan; the first stroke produces the second.
1580
Source: Essays
The Sages say that, concerning knowledge, there is only philosophy, and concerning actions, only virtue, which is generally proper to all degrees and all orders.
1580
Source: Essays
To philosophize is to learn how to die.
1580
Source: Essays
Good and bad things are often so only because of the opinion we have of them.
1580
Source: Essays
Cowardice, the mother of cruelty.
1580
Source: Essays
Our desires grow with the difficulty of satisfying them.
1580
Source: Essays
The human mind, through its weakness, is often an obstacle to itself.
1580
Source: Essays
We taste nothing pure.
1580
Source: Essays
One must learn how to endure contradiction.
1580
Source: Essays
Of good and evil, their constant mixture in all things.
1580
Source: Essays
Difficulty is inherent in the practice of virtue.
1580
Source: Essays
All things have their season.
1580
Source: Essays
The essential role of [the soul] is to master our passions.
1580
Source: Essays
Submitting everything to the examination of reason leads to many errors.
1580
Source: Essays
The uncertainty of our judgment.
1580
Source: Essays
On the inconstancy of our actions.
1580
Source: Essays
Of the true and the false, the difficulty of judging between them.
1580
Source: Essays
One cannot be too suspicious until the final signature is given, and even then, all is not yet over.
1580
Source: Essays
It has always been very hazardous [...] to expose a newly surrendered city to the excesses of a victorious army.
1580
Source: Essays
Cleomenes claimed that the law of war [...] is above the laws of divine justice, as well as those of human justice, and is not subject to them.
1580
Source: Essays
...one cannot be blamed if, in certain circumstances, we take advantage of the enemy's mistakes, just as [...] we take advantage of their cowardice.
1580
Source: Essays
War indeed allows as licit many practices that are condemnable outside of it.
1580
Source: Essays
The principle that 'no one should seek to profit from another's folly' is at fault here.
1580
Source: Essays
...the love of plunder and the spirit of vengeance overriding respect for authority and the observance of military discipline.
1580
Source: Essays
'It is always glorious to win, whether victory is due to chance or skill,' say some.
1580
Source: Essays
The philosopher Chrysippus would not have been of that opinion, and I share his way of thinking.
1580
Source: Essays
Those who [...] take part in a race must indeed use all their strength to outrun their opponents; yet they are not permitted to lay a hand on them to stop them.
1580
Source: Essays
It is not in my dignity to seek victory by stealth: I would rather have to complain of fortune than to blush for my victory.
1580
Source: Essays
[He] wants to win, not by surprise, but by the sheer force of arms.
1580
Source: Essays
We can grasp virtue in such a way that it becomes vicious, if we embrace it with a desire too harsh and violent.
1580
Source: Essays
One can both love virtue too much, and act excessively in a just cause.
1580
Source: Essays
I love temperate and moderate natures. Immoderation, even towards good itself, if it does not offend me, it astonishes me, and I struggle to name it.
1580
Source: Essays
The archer who overshoots the target fails just like the one who does not reach it.
1580
Source: Essays
The extremity of philosophy is harmful: and it is advised not to delve into it beyond the limits of what is profitable.
1580
Source: Essays
In its excess, [philosophy] enslaves our natural freedom, and leads us astray by an inopportune subtlety, from the beautiful and plain path that nature traces for us.
1580
Source: Essays
In short, there is no pleasure so just that excess and intemperance within it are not reprehensible.
1580
Source: Essays
Is man not a miserable animal? He is hardly able [...] to taste a single whole and pure pleasure, yet he takes pains to curtail it by reasoning.
1580
Source: Essays
He is not wretched enough; he must by art and study augment his own misery.
1580
Source: Essays
Human wisdom very foolishly contrives to reduce the number and sweetness of the pleasures that belong to us.
1580
Source: Essays
Our spiritual and corporeal doctors [...] find no path to healing [...] except through torment, pain, and hardship.
1580
Source: Essays
Not all pleasures and all gratifications are well-suited for all people.
1580
Source: Essays
A Magistrate [...] must have not only chaste hands, but also chaste eyes.
1580
Source: Essays
Marriage was a name of honor and dignity, not of foolish and lascivious lust.
1580
Source: Essays
Men, whatever favors Fortune showers upon them, cannot be considered happy until one has seen the last day of their life come to an end.
1580
Source: Essays
...due to the uncertainty and instability of human affairs, which the slightest thing can change completely.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems there are also spirits on high envious of the grandeurs down here.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems that Fortune sometimes lies in wait for the very last day of our life, to [...] overthrow in a moment what she took long years to build.
1580
Source: Essays
Happiness [...] depends on the tranquility and contentment of a just mind, on the resolution and firmness of a soul in command of itself.
1580
Source: Essays
[Happiness] should never be considered acquired by man, until he has been seen to play the last act [...] of the comedy that is our existence.
1580
Source: Essays
In this final scene between death and us, there is no more pretending; one must speak plainly [...] and show what is real and good at the bottom of our hearts.
1580
Source: Essays
It is the master day, the day that judges all the others; on this day [...] all my past years will be judged.
1580
Source: Essays
I defer to death the test of the fruit of my studies. We shall see then whether my words come from my mouth, or from my heart.
1580
Source: Essays
How many have owed to their death, the reputation of having lived well or ill!
1580
Source: Essays
Truly, one would rob a great deal from a man, were he to be judged without the honor and greatness of his end.
1580
Source: Essays
There are deaths that are brave and fortunate.
1580
Source: Essays
In judging the life of another, I always look at how the end of it was borne.
1580
Source: Essays
Of the principal studies of my life, one is that its end may be good, that is to say, quiet and muted.
1580
Source: Essays
There is no subject so trivial that it does not deserve a place in this rhapsody.
1580
Source: Essays
As for me, I often forget [...] these vain duties, as I cut out all ceremony in my house.
1580
Source: Essays
It is better that I offend another once, than myself every day: that would be a continual subjection.
1580
Source: Essays
To what end does one flee the servitude of courts, if one drags it into one's own lair?
1580
Source: Essays
Not only every country, but every city has its own particular civility, and every profession.
1580
Source: Essays
I like to follow them, but not so cowardly that my life is constrained by them.
1580
Source: Essays
I have often seen men who are uncivil through too much civility, and bothersome through courtesy.
1580
Source: Essays
It is, moreover, a very useful science, the science of social grace.
1580
Source: Essays
[The science of social grace] is, like grace and beauty, a conciliator of the first approaches of society and familiarity.
1580
Source: Essays
[The science of social grace] opens the door for us to learn from the examples of others...
1580
Source: Essays
...and to make use of and produce our own example, if it has something instructive and communicable.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems to me that virtue is something other and more noble than the inclinations to goodness that are born in us.
1580
Source: Essays
It seems that the name of virtue presupposes difficulty and contrast, and that it cannot be exercised without an opponent.
1580
Source: Essays
Virtue refuses facility for a companion [...] it demands a harsh and thorny path.
1580
Source: Essays
[Some philosophers] want to seek out pain, necessity, and contempt, in order to fight them and to keep their soul on its toes.
1580
Source: Essays
[A good-natured disposition] makes a man innocent, but not virtuous; exempt from doing evil, but not quite apt to do good.
1580
Source: Essays
Lack of apprehension and stupidity thus sometimes counterfeit virtuous effects.
1580
Source: Essays
When judging a particular action, one must consider many circumstances, and the whole man who produced it, before naming it.
1580
Source: Essays
I have sometimes seen my friends call prudence in me what was fortune, and esteem as courage what was an advantage of judgment.
1580
Source: Essays
I find, in many things, more order in my morals than in my opinion, and my appetites less debauched than my reason.
1580
Source: Essays
I hate cruelty, among other vices, cruelly, both by nature and by judgment, as the extreme of all vices.
1580
Source: Essays
The dead, I pity them little and would rather envy them; but I pity the dying very much.
1580
Source: Essays
Even in justice, all that goes beyond a simple death seems to me pure cruelty.
1580
Source: Essays
I have not been able to watch, without displeasure, the pursuit and killing of an innocent beast that is defenseless and from which we receive no offense.
1580
Source: Essays
No one takes pleasure in seeing beasts play and caress one another, and no one fails to take pleasure in seeing them tear each other to pieces.
1580
Source: Essays
We owe justice to men, and grace and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of it: there is some commerce and a mutual obligation between them and us.
1580
Source: Essays
To philosophize is nothing other than to prepare oneself for death.
1580
Source: Essays
All the wisdom and discourse of the world resolves itself into this one point: to teach us not to be afraid to die.
1580
Source: Essays
All the world's opinions agree on this: that pleasure is our goal, though they may take different means to achieve it.
1580
Source: Essays
In virtue itself, the ultimate goal of our aim is pleasure.
1580
Source: Essays
Of all the pleasures we know, the pursuit itself is pleasant.
1580
Source: Essays
Now one of the principal benefits of virtue is the contempt of death, a means that furnishes our life with a gentle tranquility [...].
1580
Source: Essays
The end of our race is death, it is the necessary object of our aim: if it frightens us, how is it possible to take a single step forward without a fever?
1580
Source: Essays
The remedy of the common sort is not to think about it. But from what brutal stupidity can such a coarse blindness come?
1580
Source: Essays
Let us strip [death] of its strangeness, let us practice it, let us accustom ourselves to it. Let us have nothing so often in our thoughts as death.
1580
Source: Essays
It is uncertain where death awaits us, let us await it everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty.
1580
Source: Essays
He who has learned to die has unlearned to be a slave. The knowledge of dying frees us from all subjection and constraint.
1580
Source: Essays
There is nothing evil in life for him who has rightly understood that the loss of life is not an evil.
1580
Source: Essays
The continual work of your life is to build death. You are in death while you are in life.
1580
Source: Essays
Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the place of good and evil, according to how you make it for them.
1580
Source: Essays
I want us to act, and to extend the duties of life as long as we can, and I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but nonchalant about it [...].
1580
Source: Essays
There is no passion that so shakes the sincerity of judgment as anger.
1580
Source: Essays
This is no longer correction, it is revenge.
1580
Source: Essays
While our pulse is racing and we feel emotion, let us postpone the matter: things will seem different to us when we have calmed down and cooled off.
1580
Source: Essays
It is passion that then commands, it is passion that speaks, it is not us.
1580
Source: Essays
Through passion, faults appear greater to us, like bodies seen through a fog.
1580
Source: Essays
Saying and doing are two different things; one must consider the sermon and the preacher separately.
1580
Source: Essays
It is without doubt a beautiful harmony when doing and saying go together.
1580
Source: Essays
He who says what he thinks strikes much more vividly than he who feigns.
1580
Source: Essays
[Anger] is a passion that is pleased with itself, and that flatters itself.
1580
Source: Essays
How many times, [...] if we are presented with some good defense or excuse, do we become vexed with truth itself and innocence?
1580
Source: Essays
There is no reply so sharp as such contempt.
1580
Source: Essays
I would not wish to put wisdom at such a high price.
1580
Source: Essays
I would rather show my passions than brood over them at my own expense. They languish as they are aired.
1580
Source: Essays
The storm is only born from the clashing of angers, which readily produce one another.
1580
Source: Essays
Anger sometimes serves as a weapon for virtue and valor. [...] it is a weapon that wields us; our hand does not guide it, it guides our hand.
1580
Source: Essays
Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.
1580
Source: Essays
Valor [...] takes no pleasure in sacrificing a bull unless it defends itself; it stays its hand as soon as it sees the enemy at its mercy.
1580
Source: Essays
Pusillanimity [...] having been unable to join the first act, enters the stage for the second: that of massacre and blood.
1580
Source: Essays
There is more bravery and disdain in beating one's enemy than in finishing him off; in forcing him to yield than in killing him.
1580
Source: Essays
To kill a man is to shelter him from our offenses.
1580
Source: Essays
Vengeance is to be pitied when it loses the means to make suffer the one against whom it is directed.
1580
Source: Essays
We want to win, but with the certainty of success rather than honorably; in a quarrel, we seek the result rather than the glory.
1580
Source: Essays
He who waits for an author to pass away to criticize his works, what does he demonstrate, if not that he is weak and takes pleasure in causing harm?
1580
Source: Essays
It is in nature that in the face of danger, being in company comforts and encourages.
1580
Source: Essays
Each one runs enough risks for himself without also running them for another.
1580
Source: Essays
Put three Frenchmen in the deserts of Libya, and they will not be together for a month before they harass and scratch at each other.
1580
Source: Essays
Honor in combat consists in calling [...] only upon one's valor and not upon skill.
1580
Source: Essays
Anything that goes beyond a simple death seems to me pure cruelty.
1580
Source: Essays
What makes tyrants so bloodthirsty is the care for their safety; the cowardice in their hearts provides them no other means than to exterminate [...] those who might offend them.
1580
Source: Essays
Interesting subjects always fit well wherever one places them.
1580
Source: Essays
I cannot understand the parts of which my own being is composed.
1580
Source: Essays
The end and the beginning of this [philosophical] science are equally born of foolishness.
1580
Source: Essays
One can say nothing so absurd that has not already been said by some philosopher.
1580
Source: Essays
Our mind is a wandering, dangerous, and reckless tool; it is difficult to use it with order and measure.
1580
Source: Essays
The gaze that our judgment casts upon truth can be compared [...] to that of the owl contemplating the splendor of the sun.
1580
Source: Essays
Man takes extreme care to prolong his being; he has provided for it in every way: [...] for that of his name, by glory.
1580
Source: Essays
All that our reason and intelligence produce alone, both what is true and what is false, is subject to uncertainty and debate.
1580
Source: Essays
How differently we judge things! How many times we change our minds!
1580
Source: Essays
[...] always the present opinion, the last to arrive, is the true, the infallible one.
1580
Source: Essays
if I am satisfied with my health, and the weather is fine, I am an amiable man; if I have a corn that hurts my toe, I am sullen, unpleasant, unapproachable.
1580
Source: Essays
I do nothing but come and go, my judgment does not always move straight forward, it drifts, wandering here and there [...].
1580
Source: Essays
We need not worry about which of these two systems is the true one. Who knows if, in a thousand years, a third will not overthrow them both?
1580
Source: Essays
It is folly to unite the mortal with the immortal, to believe them to be intelligent and in community of function.
1580
Source: Essays
[...] the arts and sciences are not cast all at once into a mold, but are formed and take shape little by little, by handling and polishing them [...].
1580
Source: Essays
If man does not know himself, how can he know his strength and why he is on this earth?
1580
Source: Essays