Michel de Montaigne Quotes About Life
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There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.
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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?
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Pythagoras used to say that life resembles the Olympic Games: a few people strain their muscles to carry off a prize; others bring trinkets to sell to the crowd for gain; and some there are, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to look at the show and see how and why everything is done; spectators of the life of other people in order to judge and regulate their own.
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My art and profession is to live.
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My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
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He loves little who loves by rule.
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Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
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I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.
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As for me, then, I love life and cultivate it just as God has been pleased to grant it to us.
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What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?
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The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.
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Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.
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The great and glorious masterpiece of humanity is to know how to live with a purpose.
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Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have done. I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future.
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I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man's estate.
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My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own.
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Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest.
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Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have done the greatest task of all.... All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.
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Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
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After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to the spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they proceeded to those of the slaughter of men, to the gladiators.
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I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.
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The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.
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If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.
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In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.
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If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he, and I was I.
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Make use of life while you have it. Whether you have lived enough depends upon yourself, not on the number of your years.
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If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said.
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There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
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