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To say less of yourself than is true is stupidity, not modesty. To pay yourself less than you are worth is cowardice and pusillanimity.

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
Self
Cowardice
Modesty
Stupidity
Pay
Worth
Less
True

More quotes by Michel de Montaigne

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Travelling through the world produces a marvellous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose.
Michel de Montaigne
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If you don't know how to die, don't worry Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you don't bother your head about it.
Michel de Montaigne
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It is not a mind, it is not a body that we educate, but it is a man, and we must not make two parts of him.
Michel de Montaigne
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The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.
Michel de Montaigne
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To understand via the heart is not to understand.
Michel de Montaigne
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We are all of us richer than we think we are.
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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Each person calls barbarism whatever is not his or her own practice.... We may call Cannibals barbarians, in respect to the rulesof reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.
Michel de Montaigne
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Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?
Michel de Montaigne
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Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.
Michel de Montaigne
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In his commerce with men I mean him to include- and that principally- those who live only in the memory of books. By means of history he will frequent those great souls of former years. If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.
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
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The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.
Michel de Montaigne
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There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.
Michel de Montaigne
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Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?
Michel de Montaigne
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I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own.
Michel de Montaigne
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Examples teach us that in military affairs, and all others of a like nature, study is apt to enervate and relax the courage of man, rather than to give strength and energy to the mind.
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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In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.
Michel de Montaigne
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After a tongue has once got the knack of lying, it is not to be imagined how impossible almost it is to reclaim it. Whence it comes to pass, that we see some men, who are otherwise very honest, so subject to this vice.
Michel de Montaigne