"Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art."
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Quote collection
Michel de Montaigne quotes (page 8 of 49)
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"Marriage has, for its share, usefulness, justice, honour, and constancy; a stale but more durable pleasure. Love is grounded on pleasure alone, and it is indeed more gratifying to the senses, keener and more acute; a pleasure stirred and kept alive by difficulties. There must be a sting and a smart in it. It ceases to be love if it has no shafts and no fire."
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"Take care that old age does not wrinkle your spirit even more than your face."
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"The most profound joy has more of gravity than of gaiety in it."
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"And obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigour and stability."
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"Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies."
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"For all parts of the body that we see fit to expose to the wind and air are found fit to endure it: face, feet, hands, legs, shoulders, head, according as custom invites us. For if there is a part of us that is tender and that seems as though it should fear the cold, it should be the stomach, where digestion takes place; our fathers left it uncovered, and our ladies, soft and delicate as they are, sometimes go half bare down to the navel."
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"The most universal quality is diversity."
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"I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie."
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"To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and taciturn demeanor procured the credit of prudence and capacity!"
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"Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness."
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"I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics."
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"In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum."
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"I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's."
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"One may be humble out of pride."
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"Repentance is no other than a recanting of the will, and opposition to our fancies, which lead us which way they please."
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"Philosophical discussions habitually make men happy and joyful not frowning and sad."
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"Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep."
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".. since it was true that study, even when done properly, can only teach us what wisdom, right conduct and determination consist in, they wanted to put their children directly in touch with actual cases, teaching them not by hearsay but by actively assaying them, vigorously molding and forming them not merely by word and precept but chiefly by deeds and examples, so that wisdom should not be something which the soul knows but the soul's very essence and temperament, not something acquired but a natural property."
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"A straight oar looks bent in the water. It matters not merely that we see a thing, but how we see it."
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