Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

— Michel de Montaigne

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

— Michel de Montaigne

All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.

— Michel de Montaigne

All the fame I look for in life is to have lived it quietly.

— Michel de Montaigne

All we do is to look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own.

— Michel de Montaigne

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

— Michel de Montaigne

A man must live in the world and make the best of it such as it is.

— Michel de Montaigne

A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing.

— Michel de Montaigne

And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a mind pliable in itself; that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity.

— Michel de Montaigne

Antigonos, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favor and esteem for his valor, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished, and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: “Yourself, sir,” replied the other, “by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of my life.

— Michel de Montaigne