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Michel de Montaigne quotes
Michel de Montaigne (1533 to 1592) was a French landowner and magistrate who withdrew to a tower library on his estate in 1571 and started writing. He later served as mayor of Bordeaux. The Essays first appeared in 1580. Quill quotes Charles Cotton's seventeenth-century English translation.
An essay, for him, meant a try. He wanders off the subject, changes his mind in the margins, and tells you about his digestion. Reading him for a neat takeaway rarely works. Reading him for company does, and Cotton's English gives him a lovely old creak.
All 47 of the lines in Quill. Only lines checked against a public-domain text appear on this page.
Essays
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You are no more to concern yourself how the world talks of you, but how you are to talk to yourself.
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… to one another, or you to yourself. Let the people be to you one, and be you one to the whole people. ‘Tis an unworthy ambition to think to derive glory from a man’s sloth and privacy: you are to do like the beasts of chase, who efface the track at the entrance into their den. You are no more to concern yourself how the world talks of you, but how you are to talk to yourself. Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself. A man may miscarry alone as well as in company. Till you have rendered yourself one before whom you dare not …
The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.
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The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine. Zeuxidamus, to one who asked him, why the Lacedaemonians did not commit their constitutions of chivalry to writing, and deliver them to their young men to read, made answer, that it was because they would inure them to action, and not amuse them with words. With such a one, …
The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and government of himself.
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The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and government of himself. And ‘tis said amongst other things upon this subject, that, as the must fermenting in a vessel, works up to the top whatever it has in the bottom, so wine, in those who have drunk beyond measure, vents the most inward secrets:
Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their recovery.
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Experience has, moreover, taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience. Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their recovery.
All that seems strange to us, and that we do not understand, we condemn.
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… them savages and brutes! Who did not attribute it to stupidity and want of common sense to see them mute, ignorant of the French tongue, ignorant of our salutations and cringes, our port and behaviour, from which all human nature must by all means take its pattern and example. All that seems strange to us, and that we do not understand, we condemn. The same thing happens also in the judgments we make of beasts. They have several conditions like to ours; from those we may, by comparison, draw some conjecture: but by those qualities that are particular to themselves, what know we what to make of them! The horses, dogs, …
What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations.
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… subjecting those violent employments and laborious thoughts to the ordinary usage of life: wise, had he believed the last was his ordinary, the first his extraordinary, vocation. We are great fools. “He has passed his life in idleness,” say we: “I have done nothing to-day.” What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations. “Had I been put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I could do.” “Have you known how to meditate and manage your life? you have performed the greatest work of all.” In order to shew and develop herself, nature needs only fortune; she equally …
The fear of the fall more fevers me than the fall itself.
Your death is a part of the order of the universe, ‘tis a part of the life of the world.
The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own.
Virtue is a pleasant and gay quality.
The surest way, therefore, is to prepare one’s self beforehand for occasions.
In truth, it is not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice.
Books have not so much served me for instruction as exercise.
We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned.
We trouble life by the care of death, and death by the care of life: the one torments, the other frights us.
We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning.
A great deal less would serve my turn well enough.
Fear springs sometimes as much from want of judgment as from want of courage.
In proportion as the possession of life is more short, I must make it so much deeper and fuller.
We receive things variously, according as we are, and according as they appear to us.
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.
We fluctuate betwixt various inclinations; we will nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.
We embrace not only the absent, but those who have been, and those who are not yet.
To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory.
Our good or ill has no other dependence but on ourselves.
Whoever will oblige himself to tell all, should oblige himself to do nothing that he must be forced to conceal.
Experience has, moreover, taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.
Is it reasonable so long to fear a thing that will so soon be despatched?
Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.
Whatever the benefits of fortune are, they yet require a palate to relish them.
We are not so sensible of the most perfect health as we are of the least sickness.
Life is a tender thing, and easily molested.
Nothing is so distasteful and clogging as abundance.
Every one overrates the offence of his companions, but extenuates his own.
We only labour to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it.
Everything that totters does not fall.
The most profound joy has more of severity than gaiety, in it.
Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere.
Let me shrink and draw up myself in my own shell, like a tortoise, and learn to see men without hanging upon them.
Intemperance is the pest of pleasure; and temperance is not its scourge, but rather its seasoning.
We must moderate and adapt our desires to the nearest and easiest to be acquired things.
The world looks always opposite; I turn my sight inwards, and there fix and employ it.
The estimate and value of a man consist in the heart and in the will: there his true honour lies.
Wherever your life ends, it is all there.
Make use of time while it is present with you.
Reason directs that we should always go the same way, but not always at the same pace.
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