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Michel de Montaigne -
Essays (1580)
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The wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.
Michel de Montaigne
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If by being overstudious, we impair our health and spoil our good humor, let us give it up.
Michel de Montaigne
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This very Rome that we behold deserves our love...: the only common and universal city.
Michel de Montaigne
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Sciences and Arts are not cast in a mold, but rather by little and little formed and shaped by often handling and polishing them over; even as bears fashion their young whelps by often licking them.
Michel de Montaigne
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In the examples that I here bring in of what I have [read], heard, done or said, I have refrained from daring to alter even the smallest and most indifferent circumstances. My conscience falsifies not an iota; for my knowledge I cannot answer.
Michel de Montaigne
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How often our involuntary facial motions testify to the thoughts we were keeping secret, and betray us to those around!
Michel de Montaigne
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The religion of my doctor or my lawyer cannot matter. That consideration has nothing in common with the functions of the friendship they owe me.
Michel de Montaigne
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Books are pleasant, but if by being over-studious we impair our health and spoil our good humour, two of the best things we have, let us give it over. I, for my part, am one of those who think no fruit derived from them can recompense so great a loss.
Michel de Montaigne
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Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.
Michel de Montaigne
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No wonder, said an Ancient, that chance has so much power over us, since it is by chance that we live.
Michel de Montaigne
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The shortest way to arrive at glory would be to do that for conscience which we do for glory.
Michel de Montaigne
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The beginnings of all things are weak and tender. We must therefore be clear-sighted in the beginnings, for, as in their budding we discern not the danger, so in their full growth we perceive not the remedy.
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What fear has once made me will, I am bound still to will when without fear.
Michel de Montaigne
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Obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigor and stability.
Michel de Montaigne
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I turn my gaze inward. I fix it there and keep it busy. I look inside myself. I continually observe myself.
Michel de Montaigne
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There is a certain consideration, and a general duty of humanity, that binds us not only to the animals, which have life and feeling, but even to the trees and plants. We owe justice to people, and kindness and benevolence to all other creatures who may be susceptible of it. There is some intercourse between them and us, and some mutual obligation.
Michel de Montaigne
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Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency: a man may very well say a good thing, give a good answer, cite a good sentence, without at all seeing the force of either the one or the other.
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Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.
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There are few things on which we can pass a sincere judgement, because there are few things in which we have not, in one way or another, a particular interest.
Michel de Montaigne
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Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in
Michel de Montaigne
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We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned.
Michel de Montaigne
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I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.
Michel de Montaigne
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I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance.
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Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.
Michel de Montaigne
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I admire the assurance and confidence everyone has in himself, whereas there is hardly anything I am sure I know or that I dare give my word I can do.
Michel de Montaigne
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Michel de Montaigne
Creative Commons
Born:
February 28, 1533
Died:
September 13, 1592
(aged 59)
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