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Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!
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
Create
Senseless
Cannot
Fleas
Heart
Worm
Make
Worms
Men
Dozen
Possibly
Gods
God
Flea
More quotes by Michel de Montaigne
Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil.
Michel de Montaigne
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.
Michel de Montaigne
Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.
Michel de Montaigne
Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work.
Michel de Montaigne
We have power over nothing except our will.
Michel de Montaigne
There is nothing of evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil to know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.
Michel de Montaigne
Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping themselves always in show, like the statue of a public place.
Michel de Montaigne
We seem ambitious God's whole work to undo. ...With new diseases on ourselves we war, And with new physic, a worse engine far.
Michel de Montaigne
A wise man loses nothing, if he but save himself.
Michel de Montaigne
Aesop, that great man, saw his master making water as he walked. What! he said, Must we void ourselves as we run? Use our timeas best we may, yet a great part of it will still be idly and ill spent.
Michel de Montaigne
In order always to learn something from others (which is the finest school there can be), I observe in my travels this practice: I always steer those with whom I talk back to the things they know best.
Michel de Montaigne
To speak less of oneself than what one really is, is folly, not modesty and to take that for current pay which is under a man's value, is pusillanimity and cowardice.
Michel de Montaigne
Each person calls barbarism whatever is not his or her own practice.... We may call Cannibals barbarians, in respect to the rulesof reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.
Michel de Montaigne
Plenty and indigence depend upon the opinion every one has of them and riches, like glory of health, have no more beauty or pleasure than their possessor is pleaded to lend them.
Michel de Montaigne
Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.
Michel de Montaigne
Our skin is provided as adequately as theirs with endurance against the assaults of the weather: witness so many nations who have not yet tried the use of any clothes. Our ancient Gauls wore hardly any clothes nor do the Irish, our neighbors, under so cold a sky.
Michel de Montaigne
It is not my deeds that I write down, it is myself, my essence.
Michel de Montaigne
The common notions that we find in credit around us and infused into our souls by our fathers' seed, these seem to be the universal and natural ones. Whence it comes to pass that what is off the hinges of custom, people believe to be off the hinges of reason.
Michel de Montaigne
All of the days go toward death and the last one arrives there.
Michel de Montaigne
I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.
Michel de Montaigne
