"The worst condition of humans is when they lose knowledge and control of themselves."
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Quote collection
Michel de Montaigne quotes (page 14 of 49)
979 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."
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"Friendship is a creature formed for a companionship not for a herd."
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"The profit we possess after study is to have become better and wiser."
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"Eloquence is an engine invented to manage and wield at will the fierce democracy, and, like medicine to the sick, is only employed in the paroxysms of a disordered state."
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"We cannot be held to what is beyond our strength and means; for at times the accomplishment and execution may not be in our power, and indeed there is nothing really in our own power except the will: on this are necessarily based and founded all the principles that regulate the duty of man."
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"The shortest way to arrive at glory would be to do that for conscience which we do for glory."
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"I must use these great men's virtues as a cloak for my weakness."
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"One should always have one's boots on and be ready to leave."
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"There is a certain amount of purpose, acquiescence, and satisfaction in nursing one's melancholy."
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"People of our time are so formed for agitation and ostentation that goodness, moderation, equability, constancy, and such quiet and obscure qualities are no longer felt."
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"If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live."
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"I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind."
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"Whatever the Benefits of Fortune are , they yet require a Palate fit to relish and taste them; 'Tis Fruition, and not Possession, that renders us Happy."
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"I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can."
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"No doctor takes pleasure in the health even of his friends."
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"One must be a little foolish if one does not want to be even more stupid."
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"I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind."
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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."
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"Even in the midst of compassion we feel within I know not what tart sweet titillation of malicious pleasure in seeing others suffer; children have the same feeling."
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