Quote

If love and ambition should be in equal balance, and come to jostle with equal force, I make no doubt but that the last would win the prize.

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
Lasts
Last
Jostle
Force
Prize
Come
Ambition
Make
Balance
Would
Equal
Love
Doubt
Winning

More quotes by Michel de Montaigne

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I am myself the matter of my book.
Michel de Montaigne
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A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom.
Michel de Montaigne
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Amongst all other vices there is none I hate more than cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extremest of all vices.
Michel de Montaigne
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Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.
Michel de Montaigne
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There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.
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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It is fear that I stand most in fear of, in sharpness it exceeds every other feeling.
Michel de Montaigne
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In truth, the care and expense of our fathers aims only at furnishing our heads with knowledge of judgement and virtue, little news.
Michel de Montaigne
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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.
Michel de Montaigne
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Things are not bad in themselves, but our cowardice makes them so.
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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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.
Michel de Montaigne
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And I loathe people who find it harder to put up with a gown askew than with a soul askew and who judge a man by his bow, his bearing and his boots.
Michel de Montaigne
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There is nothing so noble and so right as to play our human life well and fitly, nor anything so difficult to learn as how to livethis life well and according to Nature.
Michel de Montaigne
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I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.
Michel de Montaigne
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If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.
Michel de Montaigne
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I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness.... It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.
Michel de Montaigne
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Satiety comes of too frequent repetition and he who will not give himself leisure to be thirsty can never find the true pleasure of drinking
Michel de Montaigne
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Silence and modesty are very valuable qualities in conversation.
Michel de Montaigne
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All of the days go toward death and the last one arrives there.
Michel de Montaigne