Michel de Montaigne Art Quotations

To know how to live is my trade and my art.

Is it reasonable that even the arts should take advantage of and profit by our natural stupidity and feebleness of mind?

A wellborn mind that is practiced in dealing with people makes itself thoroughly agreeable by itself. Art is nothing else but thelist and record of the productions of such minds.

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own.

I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we willhave sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.

Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work.

Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing.

My art and profession is to live.

It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.

Dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them.

If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they "artialize" nature.

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning.

My trade and art is to live.

Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art.

But sure there is need of other remedies than dreaming, a weak contention of art against nature.

The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts, and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.

The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure no slight pleasure.

Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us.

We are neither obstinately nor wilfully to oppose evils, nor truckle under them for want of courage, but that we are naturally to give way to them, according to their condition and our own, we ought to grant free passage to diseases; and I find they stay less with me who let them alone. And I have lost those which are reputed the most tenacious and obstinate of their own defervescence, without any help or art, and contrary to their rules. Let us a little permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?

No one but yourself knows whether you are cowardly and cruel, or loyal and devout; others do not see you; they surmise you by uncertain conjectures; they perceive not so much your nature as your art.