Michael de Montaigne

French author, philosopher, and statesman (1533–1592)

Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne, also known as the Lord of Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. Wikipedia

• Born: February 28, 1533, Château de Montaigne

• Died: September 13, 1592, Château de Montaigne

• Parents: Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne

• Written: Essays

Great Thoughts Of Montaigne

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”

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

“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.”

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.”

“If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.”

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

“There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.”

“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.

“The most profound joy has more of gravity than of gaiety in it.”

“Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them.”

“A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens.”

“How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among the friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out.”

“We are all blockheads.”

“To learn that we have said or done a foolish thing, that is nothing; we must learn that we are nothing but fools, a far broader and more important lesson.”

“Not being able to govern events, I govern myself”

“[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.”