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Presumption is our natural and original malady. The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant.

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
Presumption
Natural
Self
Frail
Men
Arrogant
Time
Arrogance
Originals
Vulnerable
Original
Malady
Creatures

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Death pays all debts.
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We took advantage of [the Indians'] ignorance and inexperience to incline them the more easily toward treachery, lewdness, avarice, and every sort of inhumanity and cruelty, after the example and pattern of our ways.
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A volunteer, you assign yourself specific roles and risks according to your judgement of their brilliance and importance, and you see when life itself may be justifiably devoted to them.
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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.
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Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on credit.
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Men ... are not agreed about any one thing, not even that heaven is over our heads.
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It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness.
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The study of books is a drowsy and feeble exercise which does not warm you up.
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There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants.
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I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion.
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We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.
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Fortune does us neither good nor hurt she only presents us the matter, and the seed, which our soul, more powerfully than she, turns and applies as she best pleases being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.
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The world is but a school of inquisition it is not who shall enter the ring, but who shall run the best courses.
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Necessity is a violent school-mistress.
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I have seen people rude by being over-polite.
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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.
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If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they artialize nature.
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A man never speaks of himself without losing something. What he says in his disfavor is always beleived, but when he commends himself, he arouses mistrust.
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A liar would be brave toward God, while he is a coward toward men for a lie faces God, and shrinks from man.
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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