All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.
Michel De MontaigneRead
The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life's value is measured by how we utilize our time rather than its duration.
This quote by Michel De Montaigne emphasizes that the quality of our lives is determined by how we choose to spend our time instead of merely counting the years we have lived. It suggests that fulfillment and satisfaction come from our actions and decisions rather than simply living for a long time.
Themes
ValueLifeSatisfactionTimeQuality
In practice
Example use cases
In a graduation speech, one might use this quote to inspire students to focus on making the most of their future.
More from Michel De Montaigne
All quotes →All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.
Michel De MontaigneRead
Pythagoras used to say that life resembles the Olympic Games: a few people strain their muscles to carry off a prize; others bring trinkets to sell to the crowd for gain; and some there are, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to look at the show and see how and why everything is done; spectators of the life of other people in order to judge and regulate their own.
Michel De MontaigneRead
There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
Michel De MontaigneRead
Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
Michel De MontaigneRead
Such as are in immediate fear of a losing their estates, of banishment, or of slavery, live in perpetual anguish, and lose all appetite and repose; whereas such as are actually poor, slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk.
Michel De MontaigneRead
Similar quotes
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Arthur C. ClarkeRead
This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.
Oscar WildeRead
When you cry and weep, when you are miserable, you are alone. When you celebrate, the whole existence participates with you. Only in celebration do we meet the ultimate, the eternal. Only in celebration do we go beyond the circle of birth and death.
RajneeshRead
The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis.
Philip K. DickRead
She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.
Flannery O'ConnorRead