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Is it reasonable that even the arts should take advantage of and profit by our natural stupidity and feebleness of mind?

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
Advantage
Natural
Art
Take
Feebleness
Even
Stupidity
Mind
Reasonable
Arts
Profit

More quotes by Michel de Montaigne

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A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted.
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Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of just as we call money not only that which is legal, but also any counterfeit that will pass.
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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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Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work.
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The beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things.
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There is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy.
Michel de Montaigne
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Since I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.
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I admire the assurance and confidence everyone has in himself, whereas there is hardly anything I am sure I know or that I dare give my word I can do.
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Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.
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We feel a kind of bittersweet pricking of malicious delight in contemplating the misfortunes of others.
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The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man persuades another man to believe.
Michel de Montaigne
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Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.
Michel de Montaigne
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The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly.
Michel de Montaigne
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Seneca's virtue shows forth so live and vigorous in his writings, and the defense is so clear there against some of these imputations, as that of his wealth and excessive spending, that I would not believe any testimony to the contrary.
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Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?
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The easy, gentle, and sloping path . . . is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.
Michel de Montaigne
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If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.
Michel de Montaigne
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A person is bound to lose when he talks about himself if he belittles himself, he is believed if he praises himself, he isn't believed.
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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.
Michel de Montaigne
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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.
Michel de Montaigne