“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Montaigne: Essays

“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”
― Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“In nine lifetimes, you'll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more as I grow older.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!”
― Michel de Montaigne

“My art and profession is to live.”
― Michel de Montaigne

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

"Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.”
― Michel de Montaigne, Montaigne: Essays

“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere."

"To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
― Michel de Montaigne