A satisfied mind is a stupid one

When the mind is satisfied, that is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops whitin itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advanced, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty...

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On experience (III, 13)

Providence vs. us - the mortals

Where we go wrong, if you ask me, is in not entrusting ourselves enough to the Heaven and in expecting more from our own conduct of affairs than rightly belongs to us. That explains why our schemes so often go awry. Heaven is jealous of the scope which we allow to the rights of human wisdom to the prejudice of its own: the more we extend them the more Heaven cuts them back.

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On physiognomy (III, 12)

The perfect wife

The most useful science and the most honorable occupation for a wife is home-management. I am aware of more than one wife who is mean but of few who are good managers. Yet to be one is a wife's chief virtue, the one that we should look for first as the only dowry which may either save our households or ruin them. There is no need to lecture me on the subject: experience has taught me to seek one virtue above all others in a married woman: the virtue of housekeeping. I enable my wife to do this properly when, by my absence, I leave the government of my house in her hands. It irritates me to see in many a household my lord coming home about noon, all grimy and tetchy from business worries, while my lady in her dressing-room, dolling herself up and doing her hair. It is unjust and absurd that our wives should be maintained in idleness by our sweat and toil. As far as it lies with me, nobody shall have a more serene enjoyment of my goods than I do, one more quit and more quiet.

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On vanity (III, 9)

LOVE

I have absolutely no other passion but love to keep me going. What covetousness, ambition, quarrels and lawsuits do for men who, like me, have no other allotted task, love would do more suitably: it would restore me to vigilance, sober behaviour, graceful manners and care about my person; love would give new strength to my features so that the distortions of old age, pitiful and misshapen, should not come and disfigure them; it would bring me back to wise and healthy endeavours by which I could make myself better esteemed and better loved, banishing from my mind all sense of hopefulness about itself and about its application, while bringing it to know itself again: it would divert me away from a thousand painful thoughts, from a thousand melancholy sorrows which idleness burdens us with old age, as does the poor state of our health; it would, at least in dream, restore some heat to my blood - this blood of mine which Nature is forsaking; it would lift up my chin and unbuckle my sinews as well as the vigour and exhilaration of the soul for this poor fellow who is on his way out, rushing toward disintegration.

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On some lines of Virgil (III, 5)

The procreation and the extinction

No man likes to be in on a birth: all men rush to be in on a death. To unmake a human being we choose an open field in broad daylight: to make one, we hide away in a dark little hollow. When making one we must hide and blush: but glory lies in unmaking one, and it produces other virtues. One act is unwholesome: the other, an act of grace, (...)

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On some lines of Virgil (III, 5)

Jealousy has no cure

Curiosity is always at fault ; here it is baleful. It is madness to want to find out about an ill for which there is no treatment except one which makes it worse and exacerbates it; one the shame of which is spread abroad and augmented chiefly by our jealousy; one which to avenge means hurting our children rather than curing ourselves. You wither and die while hunting for such hidden truth. How wretched are those husbands in my days who manage to find out!

Michel de  Montaigne - Essays, On some lines of Virgil (III, 5)

Hypocrisy

The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation? We are not afraid to utter words kill, thieve or betray ; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth. Does that mean that the less we breathe a word about sex the more right we have to allow it to fill our thoughts?

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On some lines of Virgil (III, 5)

How to cure grief and sorrow

Once upon a time I was touched by a grief, powerful on account of my complection and as justified as it was powerful. I might well have died from it if I had merely trusted to my own strength. I needed a mind-departing distraction to divert it; so by art and effort I made myself fall in love, helped in that by my youth. Love comforted me and took me away from the illness brought on by that loving-friendship. The same applies everywhere: some painful ideea gets hold of me ; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. If I cannot substitute an opposite one for it, I can at least find a different one. Change always solace it, dissolves it and dispels it. If I cannot fight it, I flee it ; and by my flight I made a diversion and use craft ; by changing place, occupation and company I escape from it into the crowd of other pastimes and cogitations, in which it loses all track of me and cannot find me.

Michel de Montaigne - Complete Essays, On diversion (III, 4)

Don't be a slave of your humours and complections

We should not nail ourselves so strongly to our humours and complexions. Our main talent lies in knowing how to adapt ourselves to a variety of customs. To keep ourselves bound by the bonds of necessity to one single way of life is to be, but not to live. Souls are most beautiful when they show most variety and flexibility.

If it was for me to train myself my way, there would be no mould in which I would wish to be set without being able to throw it off. Life is a rough, irregular progress with a multitude of forms. It is to be no friend of yourself - and even less master of yourself - to be a slave endlessly following yourself, so beholden to your predispositions that you cannot stray from them not bend them.

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On tree kinds of social intercourse (III, 3)

You are the judge of yourself

Especially in the case of people like us who live private lives which only go on parade before ourselves, we must establish an inner model to serve as touchstone of our actions, by which we are at times favor ourselves or flog ourselves. I have my own laws and law-court to pass judgement on me and I appeal to them rather than elsewhere. I restrain my actions according to the standards of others, but I enlarge them according to my own. No one but you knows whether you are base or cruel, or loyal and dedicated. Others never see you: they surmise about you from uncertain conjectures; they do not see your nature so much as your artifice. So do not cling to their sentence: cling to your own.

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On repenting (III,2)

Don't follow today's morality

Basing the recompense of virtuous deeds on another's approbation is to accept too uncertain and confused a foundation - especially since in a corrupt and ignorant period like our own to be in good esteem with the masses is an insult: whom would you trust to recognize what was worthy of praise! May God save me from being a decent man according to the self-descriptions which I daily see everyone give to the honour themselves: 'What used to be vices have become morality ' (Seneca, Epist. Moral.)

Michel de Montaigne - Essays, On repenting III,2

Our construction of Reality is limited by our five senses

We have fashioned a truth by questioning our five senses working together; but perhaps we need to harmonize the contributions of eight or ten senses if we are ever to know, with certainty, what Truth is in essence.

Michel de Montaigne - An apology for Raymond Sebond (The Complete Essays II, 12)

Quantum physics in Montaigne

There is some element of multiplicity within every species; it seems unlikely,  therefore, that God made only this one universe and no other like it, or that all the matter available for this Form should have been exhausted on this one Particular.

Michel de Montaigne - An apology for Raymond Sebond (The Complete Essays, II, 12)

Lovesickness treatment

Also worth considering is the fact that those who know prescribe for lovesickness a good look at the totally naked body which is so much desired. To cool amorous passion, all you need to do is to be free to look at the one you love!

Ille quod obscoenas in aperto corpore partes
Viderat, in cursu qui fuit, haesit amor.(Ovid, Remedia amoris, 429)

[ It has been known for a man to see his mistress's private parts and to find his ardour pulled up short.]

Michel de Montaigne - An apology for Raymond Sebond (The Complete Essays, II, 12)

Doctor's orders! (part deux)

Doctors recommend us to live and behave as animals do - and ordinary people have ever said:

Tenez chauts les pieds et la teste;
Au demeurant, vivez en beste.

[ Keep feet and head warm:
Then live like the beasts.]

Michel de Montaigne - An apology for Raymond Sebond (Complete Essays II,12)

Zealous Christianity is destructive

It is evident to me that we only willingly carry out those religious duties which flatter our passions. Christians excel at hating enemies. Our zeal works wonders when it strengthen our tendency towards hatred, enmity, ambition, avarice, evil-speaking... and rebellion. On the other hand, zeal never makes anyone go flying towards goodness, kindness or temperance, unless he is miraculously pre-disposed to them by some rare complexion. Our religion was made to root out vices: now it cloaks them, nurses them, stimulates them.

Michel de Montaigne - An apology for Raymond Sebond (Essays II, 12)

The gentlemanly idea of education

I condemn all violence in the education of tender minds which are being trained for honour and freedom. In rigour and constraint there is always something servile, and I hold that you will never achieve by force what you cannot achieve by reason, intelligence and skill.

Michel de Montaigne - On the affection of fathers for their children (Complete Essays, II,8)

Drunkenness - recommended by doctors once a month

I have heard one of the best doctors in Paris, Silvius, state that it is a good thing once a month to arouse our stomachs by this excess so as to stop their powers from getting sluggish and to stimulate them in order to prevent their growing dull.

Michel de Montaigne - On drunkenness (The complete essays)

Teach your child this

Teach the boy this:

what he may justly wish for; that money is hard to earn and should be used properly; the extent of our duty to our country and to our dear ones; what God orders you to be, and what place He assigned to you in the scheme of things; what we are and what we shall win when we have overcome; [Persius, Satires, III, 69-73]

teach him what knowing and not knowing means (which ought to be the aim of study); what valour is, and justice and temperance; what difference there is between ordonate and inordinate aspirations; slavery and due subordonation; licence and liberty; what are the signs of true and solid happiness; how far we should fear death, pain and shame;

How we can flee from hardships and how we can endure them [Virgil, Aeneas, III, 459]

what principles govern our emotions and the physiology of so many and diverse stirrings within us. For it seems to me that the first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die... and to live.

Michel de Montaigne - Complete Essays (I, 26)

Our life according to Pythagoras

Our life, said Pythagoras, is like the vast throng assembled for the Olympic Games: some use their bodies there to win fame from the contests; others come to trade, to make a profit; still others - and they are by no means the worst - seek no other gain than to be spectators, seeing how everything is done and why; they watch how other men live so that they can judge and regulate their own lives.

Michel de Montaigne - Complete Essays (I, 26)