Michel de Montaigne Quotes

I, who am king of the matter I treat, and who owe an accounting for it to no one, do not for all that believe myself in all I write. I often hazard sallies of my mind which I mistrust.

Enlightenment, don't know what it is. It's up to you, the way you think.

We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.

I feel I'm entitled to my opinion, right or wrong.

What I say should always be prefaced with this: I'm not really politically articulate. I just try to be like Thomas Paine: what is common sense? So when I say these things to you, I am speaking from a humanist point of view. I just look around and see what's wrong.

You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.

Every person is a fool in somebody’s opinion.

We follow ideas and not men, and rebel against this habit of embodying a principle in a man

Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.

I think people have to look at it from a certain view. I say things because, at the end of the day, I can say whatever I want.

I write from what I take to be the realist's point of view, looking at life as it really is - or the way I see it to be.

It's my right to write on what I feel about certain incidents, and it's your choice whether to read it or not.

The majority is never right, unless it includes me.

I am too inquisitive, too skeptical, too arrogant, to let myself be satisfied with an obvious and crass solution of things. God is such an obvious and crass solution; a solution which is a sheer indelicacy to us thinkers - at bottom He is really nothing but a coarse commandment against us: ye shall not think!

I don't mean to say that I'm about to state my credo here on this page, but merely to affirm, sincerely for the first time in my life, my belief in man as an individual and independent entity. Certainly not independence in the everyday sense of the word, but pertaining to a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able - or even have the courage - to achieve.

Education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible.

Opinion is something wherein I go about to give reasons why all the world should think as I think.

The business of philosophy is to circumnavigate human nature.

Philosophy is the sum total of all that you know and what you decide is valuable.

In true democracy every man and woman is taught to think for himself or herself.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

There is nothing new about humanism. It is the yielding to Satan's first temptation of Adam and Eve: "Ye shall be as gods." (Gen. 3:5)

From time to time ponder whether you are unconsciously saying: 'Truth is what I happen to be thinking at this moment.

If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.

For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.