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
Socrates ... brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she was wasting her time, and restored her to man.... It is impossible to go back further and lower. He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do by itself.
A good marriage ... is a sweet association in life: full of constancy, trust, and an infinite number of useful and solid services and mutual obligations.
The world is but a perpetual see-saw.
I do not portray the thing in itself. I portray the passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people put it, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute.
We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
I do not know whether I would not like much better to have produced one perfectly formed child by intercourse with the muses than by intercourse with my wife.
To die is not to play a part in society; it is the act of a single person. Let us live and laugh among our friends; let us die and sulk among strangers.
It makes me hate accepting things that are probable when they are held up before me as infallibly true. I prefer these words which tone down and modify the hastiness of our propositions: "Perhaps, In some sort, Some, They say, I think," and the like.
Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world? I cannot keep a record of my life by my actions; fortune places them too low. I keep it by my thoughts.
Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.
There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.
Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.
My trade and art is to live.