Michel de Montaigne Quotes
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It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.
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Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path.
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I have seen books made of things neither studied nor ever understood ... the author contenting himself for his own part, to have cast the plot and projected the design of it, and by his industry to have bound up the fagot of unknown provisions; at least the ink and paper his own. This may be said to be a buying or borrowing, and not a making or compiling of a book.
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Report followeth not all goodness, except difficulty and rarity be joined thereto.
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Indeed, there is no such thing as an altogether ugly woman — or altogether beautiful.
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There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.
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Wise people are foolish if they cannot adapt to foolish people.
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Things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect.
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No spiritual mind remains within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its own strength.
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A person is bound to lose when he talks about himself; if he belittles himself, he is believed; if he praises himself, he isn't believed.
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There never were, in the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity.
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Is it not a noble farce, wherein kings, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the whole vast universe serves for a theatre?
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Travelling through the world produces a marvellous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose.
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I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.
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Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.
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An orator of past times declared that his calling was to make small things appear to be grand.
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It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children.
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The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.
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Nor is it enough to toughen up his soul; you must also toughen up his muscles.
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Some, either from being glued to vice by a natural attachment, or from long habit, no longer recognize its ugliness.
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We have the pleasures suitable to our lot; let us not usurp those of greatness. Ours are more natural and all the more solid and sure for being humbler. Since we will not do so out of conscience, at least out of ambition let us reject ambition.
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Lying is a terrible vice, it testifies that one despises God, but fears men.
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I have gathered a posy of other mens flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own.
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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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Man is forming thousands of ridiculous relations between himself and God.
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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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I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and reason, as the worst of all the vices. But then I am so soft in this that I cannot seea chicken's neck wrung without distress, and cannot bear to hear the squealing of a hare between the teeth of my hounds.
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A man should ever, as much as in him lieth, be ready booted to take his journey, and above all things look he have then nothing to do but with himself.
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I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more willfully obstinate.
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We are Christians by the same title as we are natives of Perigord or Germany.
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