Michel de Montaigne Virtue Quotations

Virtue cannot be followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.

Disappointment and feebleness imprint upon us a cowardly and valetudinarian virtue.

I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.

The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.

Virtue can have naught to do with ease. . . . It craves a steep and thorny path.

The easy, gentle, and sloping path . . . is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

Of all the benefits which virtue confers on us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest.

There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline.

Who is only good that others may know it, and that he may be the better esteemed when 'tis known, who will do well but upon condition that his virtue may be known to men, is one from whom much service is not to be expected.

Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.

We may so seize on virtue, that if we embrace it with an overgreedy and violent desire, it may become vicious.

It is the part of cowardliness, and not of virtue, to seek to squat itself in some hollow lurking hole, or to hide herself under some massive tomb, thereby to shun the strokes of fortune.