Michel de Montaigne Quotes

Virtue, though she gets her beginning from nature, yet receives her finishing touches from learning.

Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.

All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

The only reward of virtue is virtue.

Justice is happiness according to virtue.

It is not enough merely possess virtue, as if it were an art; it should be practiced.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

Never stop working on your statue until the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, until you see self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

Is not virtue a negation of becoming?

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

The whole of virtue consists in its practice.

Moral excellence is the bright consummate flower of all progress.

Even virtue is an art; and even its devotees are divided into those who practise it and those who are merely amateurs.

Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life.

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

No one is born without vices, and he is the best man who is encumbered with the least.

Sensibility appears to me to be neither good nor evil in itself, but in its application. Under the influence of Christian principle, it makes saints and martyrs; ill-directed, or uncontrolled, it is a snare, and the source of every temptation; besides, as people cannot get it if it is not given them, to descant on it seems to me as idle as to recommend people to have black eyes or fair complexions.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

May your mind be thoroughly impressed with the absolute necessity of universal virtue and goodness, as the only sure road to happiness, and may you walk therein with undeviating steps.

The art of living rightly is like all arts; it must be learned and practiced with incessant care.