Michel de Montaigne Quotes

We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say?

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.

The cure for pain is in the pain. Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both, you don't belong with us.

Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.

But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes.

To live in the midst of suffering, which we do, we do, amid distress, and to keep some equilibrium in the midst of that - that would be happiness enough.

Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.

Everything in moderation, and there's a perfect balance in this life if we can find it.

Balance is good, because one extreme or the other leads to misery, and I've spent a lot of my life at one of those extremes.

If you love large, you've got to hurt large. If you've got a lot of light, you've probably got an equal amount of darkness.

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.

In life, there's a ying and a yang and a balance. And when you don't have balance, you have comedy.

I take the good; I take the bad. I don't outweigh them. I just try to balance it all.

I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission.

The secret of grace is that it can be all right at the center even when it is all wrong on the edges.

Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; they exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes 'life'. I recognized that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites.

Moderation, the Golden Mean, the Aristonmetron, is the secret of wisdom and of happiness. But it does not mean embracing an unadventurous mediocrity; rather it is an elaborate balancing act, a feat of intellectual skill demanding constant vigilance. Its aim is a reconciliation of opposites.

Fulfill thy fate! Be-do-bear-and thank God.

Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

Though God take the sunne out of the Heaven, yet we must have patience.

If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.

Faith means that a man should regard any disaster simply as a fate-determined blow which must be endured.

The art of living is based on rhythm - on give & take, ebb & flow, light & dark, life & death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good & bad, right & wrong, yours & mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, 'the dance of life,' metamorphosis.