Quote

Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.

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
Part
Painting
Colors
Book
Ones
Inward
Self
Color
Author
Made
Hand
Originals
Life
Books
Original
Extraneous
Like
Purpose
Third
Clearer
Others
Thirds
Integral
Hands
Concerned
Painted

More quotes by Michel de Montaigne

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Friendship is a creature formed for a companionship not for a herd.
Michel de Montaigne
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Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own.
Michel de Montaigne
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It is an absolute perfection... to get the very most out of one's individuality.
Michel de Montaigne
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Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being.
Michel de Montaigne
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The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.
Michel de Montaigne
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It is the part of cowardice, not of courage, to go and crouch in a hole under a massive tomb, to avoid the blows of fortune.
Michel de Montaigne
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The worth of the mind consisteth not in going high, but in marching orderly.
Michel de Montaigne
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I do not portray the thing in itself. I portray the passage not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people put it, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute.
Michel de Montaigne
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God defend me from being an honest man according to the description which every day I see made by each man to his own glorification
Michel de Montaigne
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Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.
Michel de Montaigne
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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.
Michel de Montaigne
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It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children.
Michel de Montaigne
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The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
Michel de Montaigne
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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.
Michel de Montaigne
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The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.
Michel de Montaigne
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The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.
Michel de Montaigne
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The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world yet all this is but One.
Michel de Montaigne
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We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
Michel de Montaigne
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Time steals away without any inconvenience.
Michel de Montaigne
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We are all of us richer than we think we are but we are taught to borrow and to beg, and brought up more to make use of what is another's than of our own.
Michel de Montaigne