Michel de Montaigne Quotes

I fully embrace myself as a hypocrite.

When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.

I am a living contradiction.

Do I believe? God only knows.

If your heart tells you something but your mind tells you something else, which do you believe? Both are just as apt to lie. In fact, they play at deceit all the time. Mostly they balance each other, giving us that crucial reality check. But what happens on the rare occasions when they conspire together?

I have a lot of beliefs... and I live by none of them...

I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.

Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.

By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.

I was advocating for world peace, but I was waging a violent war against my own body. I was speaking about poverty and starvation, but I was eating more than my fair share. I was a hypocrite.

The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us. The worst part is, you can't even tell who is who.

Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic.

You never know what's right, what you feel inside versus what is portrayed.

I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

I feel the closest to crazy when I'm disagreeing with the voice in my head

I know myself," he cried, "but that is all-

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

There have been times when you doubt yourself. You don't know if you're working on the right things.

Conscience, the organ of feeling which dominates us and of the opinions which rule us, is presumptuous in the strong, timid in the weak and unfortunate, uneasy in the undecided.

I am the best-natured creature in the world, and yet I have already killed three, and of these three two were priests.

It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense