This, reader, is an honest book...I want to appear in my simple, natural and everyday dress, without strain or artifice; for it is myself that I portray
Michel de MontaigneI do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.
Michel de MontaigneMots clés tolerance xenophobia
We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
Michel de MontaigneMots clés conscience
The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.
Michel de MontaigneMots clés humor world problems troubles misunderstandings grammar de-montaigne
Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.
I prefer the first humor; not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.
Thus Diogenes, who pottered about by himself, rolling his tub and turning up his nose at the great Alexander, considering us as flies or bags of wind, was really a sharper and more stinging judge, to my taste, than Timon, who was surnamed the hater of men. For what we hate we take seriously. Timon wished us ill, passionately desired our ruin, shunned association with us as dangerous, as with wicked men depraved by nature. Diogenes esteemed us so little that contact with us could neither disturb him nor affect him, and avoided our company, not through fear of association with us, but through disdain of it; he considered us incapable of doing either good or evil....
Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.
If anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot. If he gets into some flattering presumption about his valor, let him remember the lives of the two Scipios, so many armies, so many nations, all of whom leave him so far behind them. No particular quality will make a man proud who balances it against the many weaknesses and imperfections that are also in him, and, in the end, against the nullity of man’s estate.
Michel de MontaigneHow many things were articles of faith to us yesterday that are fables to us today?
Michel de MontaigneThe continuous work of our life is to build death.
Michel de MontaigneThe great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live to the point.
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The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
Michel de MontaigneMots clés individuality inspirational self-esteem solitude ataraxy self-respect self-determination self-reliance self-assurance independence self-awareness self-trust self-sufficiency self-containment
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