Michel de Montaigne Self Quotations

Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

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.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.

Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.

I have a vocabulary all my own. I "pass the time" when it is wet and disagreeable. When it is fine I do not wish to pass it; I ruminate it and hold on to it. We should hasten over the bad, and settle upon the good.

If people must be talking about me, I would have it to be truthfully and justly. I would willingly return from the next world to contradict any person who described me other than I was, although he did it to honour me.

As for me, then, I love life and cultivate it just as God has been pleased to grant it to us.

Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

What fear has once made me will, I am bound still to will when without fear.

In my youth I studied for ostentation; later, a little to gain wisdom; now, for recreation; never for gain.

I honor most those to whom I show least honor; and where my soul moves with great alacrity, I forget the proper steps of ceremony.

Presumption is our natural and original malady. The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant.

My opinion is that we must lend ourselves to others and give ourselves only to ourselves. If my will happened to be prone to mortgage and attach itself, I would not last: I am too tender, both by nature and by practice.

To say less of yourself than is true is stupidity, not modesty. To pay yourself less than you are worth is cowardice and pusillanimity.

Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from whathe is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.

True freedom is to have power over oneself for everything.

I would rather be old for a shorter time than be old before my time.

The worst condition of humans is when they lose knowledge and control of themselves.

We have power over nothing except our will.

May God defend me from myself.

True it is that she who escapeth safe and unpolluted from out the school of freedom, giveth more confidence of herself than she who comet sound out of the school of severity and restraint.

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 .

From Obedience and submission comes all our virtues, and all sin is comes from self-opinion.

Men throw themselves on foreign assistances to spare their own, which, after all, are the only certain and sufficient ones.

Authors communicate with the people by some special extrinsic mark; I am the first to do so by my entire being, as Michel de Montaigne.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

If others surpass you in knowledge, in charm, in strength, in fortune, you have other causes to blame for it; but if you yield tothem in stoutness of heart you have only yourself to blame.

There is a certain amount of purpose, acquiescence, and satisfaction in nursing one's melancholy.