Quote

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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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
May
Barbarism
Persons
Barbarians
Person
Calls
Reason
Diversity
Cannibals
Every
Respect
Barbarity
Kind
Practice
Cannibalism
Call
Cannibal
Whatever
Surpass

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The human face is a weak guarantee yet it deserves some consideration. And if I had to whip the wicked, I would do so more severely to those who belied and betrayed the promises that nature had implanted on their brows I would punish malice more harshly when it was hidden under a kindly appearance.
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Every day I hear stupid people say things that are not stupid.
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No pleasure is fully delightful without communications, and no delight absolute except imparted.
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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.
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Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.
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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 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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It is no hard matter to get children but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.
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There is a certain consideration, and a general duty of humanity, that binds us not only to the animals, which have life and feeling, but even to the trees and plants. We owe justice to people, and kindness and benevolence to all other creatures who may be susceptible of it. There is some intercourse between them and us, and some mutual obligation.
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The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
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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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It is a rare life that remains orderly even in private.
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Time steals away without any inconvenience.
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Rejoice in the things that are present all else is beyond thee.
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Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
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I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and reason, as the worst of all the vices. But then I am so soft in this that I cannot seea chicken's neck wrung without distress, and cannot bear to hear the squealing of a hare between the teeth of my hounds.
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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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Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.
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... whoever believes anything esteems that it is a work of charity to persuade another of it.
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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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