Montaigne Quotes

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Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.

Michel de Montaigne
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A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
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Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience.

Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne - Complete
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The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
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As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance. [On witchburning in France during the 16th Century.]

Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer
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He blushed to see other Frenchmen overcome with joy whenever they met a compatriot abroad. The would fall on each other, cluster in a raucous group, and pass whole evenings complaining about the barbarity of the locals. These were the few who actually noticed that locals did things differently. Others managed to travel so ‘covered and wrapped in a taciturn and incommunicative prudence, defending themselves from the contagion of an unknown atmosphere’ that they noticed nothing at all.

Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer
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There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

Michel Montaigne
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When I play with my cat who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?

Michel Montaigne
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To make a crooked stick straight we bend it the contrary way.

Michel Montaigne
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No one is exempt from talking nonsense the misfortune is to do it solemnly.

Michel Montaigne
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