Quotes by Michel de Montaigne

“Fear is natural. Be with it.”

“A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.”

“Do what you fear most and you control fear.”

“We must travel in the direction of our fear.”

“The youth and cheerfulness of morning are in happy analogy, and of powerful operation; and if the distress be not poignant enough to keep the eyes unclosed, they will be sure to open to sensations of softened pain and brighter hope”

“Traveling through the world produces a marvelous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose. This great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves. There are so many different tempers, so many different points of view, judgments, opinions, laws and customs to teach us to judge wisely on our own, and to teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness.”

“Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it”

“I despise the pleasure of pleasing people whom I despise”

“Life is a dream; when we sleep we are awake, and when awake we sleep”

“I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind--and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.”

“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.”

“Be content to seem what you really are”

“Since we cannot match it let us take our revenge by abusing it.”

“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....”

“Men come and they go and they trot and they dance, and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come - to them, their wives, their children, their friends - cathcing them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries what fury, what despair!”

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

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

I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

The greater part of the worlds troubles are due to questions of grammar.