There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.
— Michel de Montaigne
The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.
When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.
We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.
A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.
Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.
My trade and art is to live.
One may be humble out of pride.
If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.
I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.
The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.
There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.
In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum.
Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.
The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.
An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.
There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.
I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.
The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.
It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.
I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.
Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.
I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.
The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.
The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.
Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think.
For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.
Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.
How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.
Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.
The world is but a perpetual see-saw.
'Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.
Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one's own goodness.
I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.
Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.
Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.
Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
