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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.
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
Use
Length
Littles
Advantage
Little
Lived
Enough
Lies
Long
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Measured
More quotes by Michel de Montaigne
A young man ought to cross his own rules, to awake his vigor, and to keep it from growing faint and rusty. And there is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is carried on by rule and discipline.
Michel de Montaigne
This notion [skepticism] is more clearly understood by asking What do I know?
Michel de Montaigne
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.
Michel de Montaigne
Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?
Michel de Montaigne
We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?
Michel de Montaigne
How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!
Michel de Montaigne
Men are nothing until they are excited.
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
Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.
Michel de Montaigne
A straight oar looks bent in the water. It matters not merely that we see a thing, but how we see it.
Michel de Montaigne
If these Essays were worthy of being judged, it might fall out, in my opinion, that they would not find much favour, either with common and vulgar minds, or with uncommon and eminent ones: the former would not find enough in them, the latter would find too much they might manage to live somewhere in the middle region.
Michel de Montaigne
The thing I fear most is fear.
Michel de Montaigne
For me, who only desire to become wise, not more learned or eloquent, these logical or Aristotelian dispositions of parts are of no use.
Michel de Montaigne
We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
Michel de Montaigne
To behave rightly, we ourselves should never lay a hand on our servants as long as our anger lasts. Things will seem different to us when we have quieted and cooled down.
Michel de Montaigne
It is the part of cowardice, not of courage, to go and crouch in a hole under a massive tomb, to avoid the blows of fortune.
Michel de Montaigne
If people must be talking about me, I would have it to be truthfully and justly. I would willingly return from the next world to contradict any person who described me other than I was, although he did it to honour me.
Michel de Montaigne
Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own.
Michel de Montaigne
Children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
Michel de Montaigne
The only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write.
Michel de Montaigne
