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We should be similarly wary of accepting common opinions we should judge them by the ways of reason not by popular vote.

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
Reason
Judge
Way
Judging
Vote
Accepting
Ways
Wary
Opinion
Similarly
Common
Opinions
Political
Popular

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The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life.
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The great and glorious masterpiece of men is to live to the point. All other things-to reign, to hoard, to build-are, at most, but inconsiderable props and appendages.
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A man must not always tell all, for that be folly but what a man says should be what he thinks.
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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.
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Beauty is the true prerogative of women, and so peculiarly their own, that our sex, though naturally requiring another sort of feature, is never in its lustre but when puerile and beardless, confused and mixed with theirs.
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Laws are often made by fools, and even more often by men who fail in equity because they hate equality: but always by men, vain authorities who can resolve nothing.
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No spiritual mind remains within itself it is always aspiring and going beyond its own strength.
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Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground.
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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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A strong imagination begetteth opportunity.
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A well-bred man is always sociable and complaisant.
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And not to serve for a table-talk.
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We are more unhappy to see people ahead of us than happy to see people behind us.
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God defend me from myself.
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Glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place.
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It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.
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I may indeed very well happen to contradict myself but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.
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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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The shortest way to arrive at glory should be to do that for conscience which we do for glory. And the virtue of Alexander appears to me with much less vigor in his theater than that of Socrates in his mean and obscure. I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander, but Alexander in that of Socrates I cannot.
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It is not my deeds that I write down, it is myself, my essence.
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