A Quote by Michel de Montaigne
The vulgar and common esteem is seldom happy in hitting right; and I am much mistaken if, amongst the writings of my time, the worst are not those which have most gained the popular applause.
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I ever will profess myself the greatest friend to those whose actions best correspond with their doctrine; which, I am sorry to say, is too seldom the case amongst those nations who pretend most to civilization.
It is an error common to many to take the character of mankind from the worst and basest amongst them; whereas, as an excellent writer has observed, nothing should be esteemed as characteristical, of a species but what is to be found amongst the best and the most perfect individuals of that species.
What difference, if you are mistaken? For if I am mistaken, I am. For he who is not, assuredly cannot be mistaken; and therefore I am, if I am mistaken. Therefore because I am if I am mistaken, how am I mistaken that I am, when it is sure that I am, if I am mistaken.
As much as I am very critical of Ariel Sharon in the first Lebanon war, I think that he was the right person at the right time in the right place as prime minister. He made a series of very significant decisions, not one of which was popular or seemed justified at the time.
You can tell by the applause: There's perfunctory applause, there's light applause, and then there's real applause. When it's right, applause sounds like vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce.
Characters die all the time. At times, they die amongst a reader's tears, and at others, amongst the applause, and some, still, in quiet satisfaction.
He who is mistaken in an action which he sincerely believes to be right may be an enemy, but retains our esteem.
But the most common species of love is that which first arises from beauty, and afterwards diffuses itself into kindness and into the bodily appetite. Kindness or esteem, and the appetite to generation, are too remote to unite easily together. The one is, perhaps, the most refined passion of the soul; the other the most gross and vulgar. The love of beauty is placed in a just medium betwixt them, and partakes of both their natures: From whence it proceeds, that it is so singularly fitted to produce both.
I have recommended in my writings the study of civic virtues, without which there is no redemption. I have written likewise (and repeat my words) that reforms, to be beneficial, must come from above, that those which come from below are irregularly gained and uncertain.
What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.
Comedy crowds - we always want to come out and ask you, 'How you feeling?' We always say that, 'By a round of applause, how do you feel?' Right? 'By a round of applause, how you feeling?' It's the only place in the world that you judge how you're feeling by a round of applause... There's never like a car accident, people all over the ground, people running over - 'Ma'am! Ma'am! By a round of applause, how do you feel? By a round of applause - she's not clapping!
We seldom repent of speaking little, very often of speaking too much: a vulgar and trite maxim, which all the world knows and, but which all the world does not practice
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.
Most of your competition spend their days looking forward to those rare moments when everything goes right. Imagine how much leverage you have if you spend your time maximizing those common moments when it doesn't.
There was a time when being loaded and loved and popular really mattered a lot to me. I'd say that when I was less popular, I learned to be happy without those things.
The Bible is a collection of writings by lots of different people written over maybe a thousand years, from a number of centuries before Jesus to a century after Jesus. I often like to refer to it as "the Scriptures" to make that point about it being lots of writings that were originally separate. What these writings have in common is that "the Old Testament" is writings that grabbed the Jewish people; writings that convinced them that they were God's word to them. And "the New Testament" is writings that grabbed people who believed in Jesus in the same way.
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