"Not being able to govern events, I govern myself."
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Quote collection
Michel de Montaigne quotes (page 3 of 49)
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"There are some defeats more triumphant than victories."
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"Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."
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"I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of."
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"If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he, and I was I."
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"When all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; his accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never."
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"Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one's own goodness."
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"Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face."
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"I would like to suggest that our minds are swamped by too much study and by too much matter just as plants are swamped by too much water or lamps by too much oil; that our minds, held fast and encumbered by so many diverse preoccupations, may well lose the means of struggling free, remaining bowed and bent under the load; except that it is quite otherwise: the more our souls are filled, the more they expand; examples drawn from far-off times show, on the contrary, that great soldiers ad statesmen were also great scholars."
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"Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately."
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"Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments."
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"The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes."
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"Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind."
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"The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre."
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"True freedom is to have power over oneself for everything."
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"I know that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of the world to the other"
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"I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself."
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"The lack of wealth is easily repaired but the poverty of the soul is irreplaceable."
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"I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old."
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"Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being."
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