Quote

How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?

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
Makes
Excuse
Truth
Defense
Persons
Anger
Person
Angry
Good
Moved
Offending
Cause
Presents
Causes
Innocence
Often
False

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We have so much ill fortune as inconstancy, or so much bad purpose as folly, we are not so full of evil as we are of inanity we are not so wretched as we are base
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And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?
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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.
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Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.
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If health and a fair day smile upon me, I am a very good fellow if a corn trouble my toe, I am sullen, out of humor, and inaccessible.
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Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.
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All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.
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It is a human tendency to measure truth and error by our capacity.
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Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.
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If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.
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I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.
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Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?
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Disappointment and feebleness imprint upon us a cowardly and valetudinarian virtue.
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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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The beginnings of all things are weak and tender. We must therefore be clear-sighted in the beginnings, for, as in their budding we discern not the danger, so in their full growth we perceive not the remedy.
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He who lives not to others, lives little to himself.
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We seem ambitious God's whole work to undo. ...With new diseases on ourselves we war, And with new physic, a worse engine far.
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When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.
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No doctor takes pleasure in the health even of his friends.
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Every period of life has its peculiar prejudices whoever saw old age, that did not applaud the past, and condemn the present times?
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