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
If virtue cannot shine bright, but by the conflict of contrary appetites, shall we then say that she cannot subsist without the assistance of vice, and that it is from her that she derives her reputation and honor?
Nature has with a Motherly Tenderness observed this, that the Action she has enjoyned us for our Necessity should be also pleasant to us, and invites us to them, not only by Reason, but also by Appetite: and ’tis Injustice to infringe her Laws.
We find our energies are actually cramped when we are overanxious to succeed.
He was doubtless an understanding Fellow that said, there was no happy Marriage but betwixt a blind Wife and a deaf Husband.
I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.
I don't break the law* made for crooks, when I take away my own property - thus I am not obliged to conform to the law made for murderers when I deprive myself of my own life.
Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like silkworms, and is suffocated in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel...thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered.
Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.
Laws are often made by fools, and even more often by men who fail in equity because they hate equality: but always by men, vain authorities who can resolve nothing.
Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.
A little of everything and nothing thoroughly, after the French fashion.
I find no quality so easy for a man to counterfeit as devotion, though his life and manner are not conformable to it; the essence of it is abstruse and occult, but the appearances easy and showy.
We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned.
It costs an unreasonable woman no more to pass over one reason than another; they cherish themselves most where they are most wrong.