"If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I."
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Michel de Montaigne quotes (page 19 of 49)
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"But sure there is need of other remedies than dreaming, a weak contention of art against nature."
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"There is no virtue which does not rejoice a well-descended nature; there is a kind of I know not what congratulation in well-doing, that gives us an inward satisfaction, and a certain generous boldness that accompanies a good conscience."
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"How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among the friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out."
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"If atoms do, by chance, happen to combine themselves into so many shapes, why have they never combined together to form a house or a slipper? By the same token, why do we not believe that if innumerable letters of the Greek alphabet were poured all over the market-place they would eventually happen to form the text of the Iliad?"
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"Persons of mean understandings, not so inquisitive, nor so well instructed, are made good Christians, and by reverence and obedience, implicity believe, and abide by their belief."
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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"
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"Habit is second nature."
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"Diogenes was asked what wine he liked best; and he answered as I would have done when he said, "Somebody else's"."
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"He that I am reading seems always to have the most force."
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"I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more willfully obstinate."
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"I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy."
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"Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end."
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"My reason is not framed to bend or stoop: my knees are."
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"In plain Truth, it is no Want, but rather Abundance that creates Avarice."
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"Since we cannot match it let us take our revenge by abusing it."
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"One man may have some special knowledge at first-hand about the character of a river or a spring, who otherwise knows only what everyone else knows. Yet to give currency to this shred of information, he will undertake to write on the whole science of physics. From this fault many great troubles spring."
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"There is no passion so contagious as that of fear."
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"There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to."
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"If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves."
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