Michel de Montaigne Quotes

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.

Who has excess and supplies the world? Only the one who follows the Way.

Receive the gifts of fortune without pride, and part with them without reluctance.

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise. Become a stranger to need of pity. Or if compassion be freely given out, take only enough. Stop short of the urge to plead, then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger than your own small heart or greater than a star. Tame wild disappointment with caress, unmoved and cold. Make of it a parka for your soul. Discover the reason why so tiny human midget exists at all, so scared and so unwise. But expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.

If thou wouldst be happy, bring thy mind to thy condition, and have an indifferency for more than what is sufficient.

The earth does not argue, Is not pathetic, has no arrangements, Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise, Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.

Vex not thy spirit at the course of things; they heed not thy vexation. How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that may happen in life.

Be content with doing calmly the little which depends upon yourself, and let all else be to you as if it were not.

You must let what happens happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise.

Love not too well the work of thy hands and the devices of thy heart; and remember that the true hope of the Noldor lieth in the West, and cometh from the Sea.

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.

The True Person governs by emptying the heart of desire and filling the belly with food, weakening ambitions and strengthening bones.

All things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure.

Too much is a vanity; enough is a feast.

Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don't expect too much, enjoy what you have.

Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.

We need to learn to let go as easily as we grasp and we will find our hands full and our minds empty.

Consistency is a jewel, but too much jewelry is vulgar.

Love of colors bewilders the eye and it fails to see right. Love of harmonies bewitches the ear, and it loses its true hearing. Love of perfumes fills the head with dizziness. Love of flavors ruins the taste. Desires unsettle the heart until the original nature runs amok. These five are enemies of true life. Yet these are what men of discernment claim to live for. They are not what I live for. If this is life, then pigeons in a cage have found happiness!

It is those who have enough but not too much who are the happiest.

If your life is in harmony, then your life is full and good, but not overcrowded. If it is overcrowded, you are doing more than is right for you, more than is your job to do in the total scheme of things.

Where there is too much, something is missing.

Vex not thy spirit at the course of things, they heed not thy vexations