Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
Michel Eyquem de Montaignewas one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with serious intellectual insight; his massive volume Essaiscontains some of the most influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers all over the world, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche,...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth28 February 1533
CountryFrance
God is favorable to those whom he makes to die by degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age. The last death will be so much the less painful: it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most.
The laws of conscience, though we ascribe them to nature, actually come from custom.
Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.
I admire the assurance and confidence everyone has in himself, whereas there is hardly anything I am sure I know or that I dare give my word I can do.
We every day and every hour say things of another that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but apply our observations to our own concerns.
Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.
We find ourselves more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile simplicities of our children, than we do, afterward, with their most complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men.
An ancient father says that a dog we know is better company than a man whose language we do not understand.
For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness.
I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion.
What a man hates, he takes seriously.
The general order of things that takes care of fleas and moles also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself.
A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children's affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection.
Some men seem remarkable to the world in whom neither their wives nor their valets saw anything extraordinary. Few men have been admired by their servants.