Yannis Stavrou, Still Life, oil on canvas
A great mind...
About human nature...
Michel de Montaigne
Aphorisms
- A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
- A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.
- A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.
- A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.
- Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.
- Ambition is not a vice of little people.
- An unattempted lady could not vaunt of her chastity.
- An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.
- Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.
- Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.
- Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one's own goodness.
- 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.
- Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.
- Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.
- Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
- Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.
- Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.
- Few men have been admired of their familiars.
- For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
- Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.
- He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
- He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.
- How many condemnations I have witnessed more criminal than the crime!
- How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.
- I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.
- I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.
- I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.
- I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.
- I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.
- I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
- I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
- I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.
- I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
- I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man's estate.
- I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.
- I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.
- I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
- 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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