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I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion.
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
Please
Honest
Books
Reading
Book
Diversion
Seek
More quotes by Michel de Montaigne
If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.
Michel de Montaigne
We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say?
Michel de Montaigne
Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path.
Michel de Montaigne
Amongst so many borrowed things, am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.
Michel de Montaigne
We are born to inquire after truth it belongs to a greater power to possess it. It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine knowledge.
Michel de Montaigne
Wise people are foolish if they cannot adapt to foolish people.
Michel de Montaigne
No man dies before his hour. The time you leave behind was no more yours, than that which was before your birth, and concerneth you no more.
Michel de Montaigne
A wise man loses nothing, if he but save himself.
Michel de Montaigne
When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly.
Michel de Montaigne
It takes so much to be a king that he exists only as such. That extraneous glare that surrounds him hides him and conceals him from us our sight breaks and is dissipated by it being filled and arrested by this strong light.
Michel de Montaigne
Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves by railing at it and yet it is not absolutely railing against anything, to proclaim its defects, because they are in all things to be found, how beautiful or how much to be coveted soever.
Michel de Montaigne
As far as fidelity is concerned, there is no animal in the world as treacherous as man.
Michel de Montaigne
I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.
Michel de Montaigne
I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.
Michel de Montaigne
The only thing certain is nothing is certain.
Michel de Montaigne
Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.
Michel de Montaigne
Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think.
Michel de Montaigne
To smell, though well, is to stink.
Michel de Montaigne
Thus we should beware of clinging to vulgar opinions, and judge things by reason's way, not by popular say.
Michel de Montaigne
It is the rule of rules, and the general law of all laws, that every person should observe those of the place where he is.
Michel de Montaigne
