Michel de Montaigne Quotes

Everyone asks, Will he make it, will she make it? You never make it.

We all have two things in common, no matter who we are: We were born and we are going to die.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

Man is a substance clad in shadows.

Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.

Even when you're making a movie about life, death is a presence, and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly.

I find life so shocking in general. Everything about it surprises me.

I used to think I was going to die wise, and now, the one wisdom I have is I know very little.

I think that laughter and death are closely related: comedy is the quintessential human reaction to the fear of death. It's probably linked with the fact that we are the only animals who know we must die.

At the end of the day, we came into the world naked, and that's the way we're going to go.

We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

Lustre of man walking proud beneath the sky diminishes to nothing and goes unregarded.

Human existence basically is──a never to be completed imperfect tense.

She felt a little nervous about this; 'for it might end, you know,' said Alice to herself, 'in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?' And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.

I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.

People aren't evil and people aren't good. They live how they can one day at a time. They come out of dust they go back to dust, dusty feet, no wings, and whose fault is that?

All salvation is temporary

What a miserable life is this! There is no happiness that is secure and nothing that does not change.

Alas! What is man? Whether he be deprived of that light which is from on high, of whether he discard it, a frail and trembling creature; standing on time, that bleak and narrow isthmus between two eternities, he sees nothing but impenetrable darkness on the one hand, and doubt, distrust, and conjecture, still more perplexing, on the other. Most gladly would he take an observation, as to whence he has come, or whither he is going; alas, he has not the means: his telescope is too dim, his compass too wavering, his plummet too short.