"The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity."
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Quote collection
Michel de Montaigne quotes (page 49 of 49)
979 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him."
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"Friendship that possesses the whole soul, and there rules and sways with an absolute sovereignty, can admit of no rival."
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"I never met a man who thought his thinking was faulty."
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"We have so much ill fortune as inconstancy, or so much bad purpose as folly, we are not so full of evil as we are of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are base"
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"Everything must not always be said, for that would be folly."
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"The desire for riches is more sharpened by their use than by their need. Pleasing all: a mark that can never be aimed at or hit."
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"I have gathered a posy of other mens flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own."
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"It needs courage to be afraid."
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"I set forth notions that are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance."
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"To say less of yourself than is true is stupidity, not modesty. To pay yourself less than you are worth is cowardice and pusillanimity."
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"Whoever will imagine a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgment without leaning or inclination, on any occasion whatever, hasa conception of Pyrrhonism."
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"The common notions that we find in credit around us and infused into our souls by our fathers' seed, these seem to be the universal and natural ones. Whence it comes to pass that what is off the hinges of custom, people believe to be off the hinges of reason."
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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."
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"The only good histories are those written by those who had command in the events they describe."
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"Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path."
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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."
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"Health is a precious thing, and the only one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out not only his time, sweat, labor and goods, but also life itself to obtain it."
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"Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, ... hit on a body and face so ugly and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty."
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