Michel de Montaigne Quotes

Nature has unlimited time in which to travel along tortuous paths to an unknown destination. The mind of man is too feeble to discern whence or whither the path runs and has to be content if it can discern only portions of the track, however small.

Our mind, by virtue of a certain finite, limited capability, is by no means capable of putting a question to Nature that permits a continuous series of answers. The observations, the individual results of measurements, are the answers of Nature to our discontinuous questioning.

Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run.

There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

Jesus! Did I SAY that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious.

People run away, pull their hair, go off in different directions, nodding their heads and going, "Oh, God." I am slightly disheveled, I think. I'm really pleased that I am, because otherwise I could be in a really, really dull and boring place now, as a musician, at least.

Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.

No man can exactly calculate the capacity of human genius and stupidity, nor the incapacity of will.

'Tis certain that our senses are extremely disproportioned for comprehending the whole compass and latitude of things.

Is it any wonder the power this man held over me - this man who did not run from his demons like most of us do, but embraced them as his own, clutching them to his heart in a choke-hold grip. He did not try to escape them by denying them or drugging them or bargaining with them. He met them where they lived, in the secret place most of us keep hidden. Warthrop was Warthrop down to the marrow of his bones, for his demons defined him; they breathed the breath of life into him; and without them, he would go down, as most of us do, into the purgatorial fog of a life unrealized.

Truth . . . and if mine eyes Can bear its blaze, and trace its symmetries, Measure its distance, and its advent wait, I am no prophet - I but calculate.

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me, my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running. So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes, and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.

You can run away from home But you can't run away from your pain I sit here alone There's always someone else to blame.

We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore.

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.

Oh,' she said, too bone-weary to pretend: 'I would far rather that I love you as I saw yesterday I do than that I had gone on worshiping you as I did not long since.' And she turned away hastily, and did not see that Little John would reach out to her; and half-running, went to Tuck's cottage, where she could pull on her half-dry clothes, and become a proper outlaw again. At least, she thought, fighting back tears, like this I am Cecil, with a place among friends, and a task to do. I am someone. I wonder if perhaps if I am no longer Cecil, I am no one at all.

Attachment is the root cause of all misery - and our mind is such that it starts clinging to each and everything. It starts becoming identified, attached, it does not know how to keep a distance; hence the misery.

There are situations in which hope and fear run together, in which they mutually destroy one another and lose themselves in dull indifference.

I am a lonely runner, but I am a long-distance runner.

Once you start losing reality, when you start losing reality with yourself, sometimes people just get dizzy.

It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend.

Under the seams runs the pain.

I freely admit I'm confused. I'm a confused and troubled individual but at the same time...Its Free!

If you've never stared off into the distance, then your life is a shame.