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
Eloquence is an engine invented to manage and wield at will the fierce democracy, and, like medicine to the sick, is only employed in the paroxysms of a disordered state.
No one but yourself knows whether you are cowardly and cruel, or loyal and devout; others do not see you; they surmise you by uncertain conjectures; they perceive not so much your nature as your art.
I may indeed very well happen to contradict myself; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.
Tis well for old age that it is always accompanied with want of perception, ignorance, and a facility of being deceived. For should we see how we are used and would not acquiesce, what would become of us?
Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.
Who ever saw a doctor use the prescription of his colleague without cutting out or adding something?
The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.
The most universal quality is diversity.
I do not understand; I pause; I examine.
I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.
The man who thinks he knows does not yet know what knowing is
The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.
And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.
I must use these great men's virtues as a cloak for my weakness.