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He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met to be the sea and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.
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
Firsts
Mets
First
Sea
Greatest
Conclude
Kind
Seen
Imagined
Things
Within
River
Never
Knowledge
Extremes
Makes
Fallen
Nature
Rivers
More quotes by Michel de Montaigne
No man divulges his revenue, or at least which way it comes in: but every one publishes his acquisitions.
Michel de Montaigne
In my youth I studied for ostentation later, a little to gain wisdom now, for recreation never for gain.
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Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.
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One should always have one's boots on and be ready to leave.
Michel de Montaigne
He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea.
Michel de Montaigne
The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all they will chew our meat for us.
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I have gathered a posy of other mens flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own.
Michel de Montaigne
We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.
Michel de Montaigne
My errors are by now natural and incorrigible but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.
Michel de Montaigne
I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.
Michel de Montaigne
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.
Michel de Montaigne
In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum.
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The wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.
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
I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden.
Michel de Montaigne
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
Michel de Montaigne
Seeing that the Senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason there is no reason but must be built upon another reason: so here we are retreating backwards to infinity.
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
What am I to choose? Choose what you please, as long as you choose. There you have a foolish answer, which seems to be the outcome, however, of all Dogmatism, which will not allow us to be ignorant of that which we are ignorant.
Michel de Montaigne
In the examples that I here bring in of what I have [read], heard, done or said, I have refrained from daring to alter even the smallest and most indifferent circumstances. My conscience falsifies not an iota for my knowledge I cannot answer.
Michel de Montaigne