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It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully.
Michel de Montaigne
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Michel de Montaigne
Age: 59 †
Born: 1533
Born: February 28
Died: 1592
Died: September 13
Autobiographer
Essayist
French Moralist
Jurist
Philosopher
Poet Lawyer
Politician
Translator
Writer
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Miquèu Eiquèm de Montanha
Miqueu Eiquem de Montanha
Absolute
Perfection
Divine
Enjoy
Rightfully
Virtually
Absolutes
More quotes by Michel de Montaigne
Men ... are not agreed about any one thing, not even that heaven is over our heads.
Michel de Montaigne
The great and glorious masterpiece of humanity is to know how to live with a purpose.
Michel de Montaigne
Getting married is very much like going to a restaurant with friends. You order what you want then when you see what the other person has, you wish you had ordered that.
Michel de Montaigne
I love those historians that are either very simple or most excellent. Such as are between both (which is the most common fashion), it is they that spoil all they will needs chew our meat for us and take upon them a law to judge, and by consequence to square and incline the story according to their fantasy.
Michel de Montaigne
One should be ever booted and spurred and ready to depart.
Michel de Montaigne
The knowledge of courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study. It is like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first sight.
Michel de Montaigne
The study of books is a drowsy and feeble exercise which does not warm you up.
Michel de Montaigne
Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.
Michel de Montaigne
I honor most those to whom I show least honor and where my soul moves with great alacrity, I forget the proper steps of ceremony.
Michel de Montaigne
Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it.
Michel de Montaigne
The world always looks straights ahead as for me, I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him: as for me, I look inside me: I have no business but with myself I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself. Others...they always go forward as for me, I roll about in myself.
Michel de Montaigne
Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path.
Michel de Montaigne
Can anything be imagined so ridiculous that this miserable and wretched creature, who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?
Michel de Montaigne
I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
Michel de Montaigne
Ambition is, of all other, the most contrary humor to solitude and glory and repose are so inconsistent that they cannot possibly inhabit one and the same place and for so much as I understand, those have only their arms and legs disengaged from the crowd, their mind and intention remain engaged behind more than ever.
Michel de Montaigne
I consider it equal injustice to set our heart against natural pleasures and to set our heart too much on them. We should neither pursue them, nor flee them we should accept them.
Michel de Montaigne
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.
Michel de Montaigne
Teach him a certain refinement in sorting out and selecting his arguments, with an affection for relevance and so for brevity. Above all let him be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether the truth is born at his rival's doing or within himself from some change in his ideas.
Michel de Montaigne
Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.
Michel de Montaigne
Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of just as we call money not only that which is legal, but also any counterfeit that will pass.
Michel de Montaigne
