Michel De Montaigne

Peoples nurtured on freedom and self-government judge any other form of polity to be deformed and unnatural. Those who are used to monarchy do the same .

We should be similarly wary of accepting common opinions; we should judge them by the ways of reason not by popular vote.

It is a human tendency "to measure truth and error by our capacity."

Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man's estate.

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

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 put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.

It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength.

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.

We are Christians by the same title as we are natives of Perigord or Germany.

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.

Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.

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

Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.

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

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness.

Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.

The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.