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
Our speech has its weaknesses and its defects, like all the rest. Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.
Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it.
A wellborn mind that is practiced in dealing with people makes itself thoroughly agreeable by itself. Art is nothing else but thelist and record of the productions of such minds.
Is it reasonable that even the arts should take advantage of and profit by our natural stupidity and feebleness of mind?
In the examples that I here bring in of what I have [read], heard, done or said, I have refrained from daring to alter even the smallest and most indifferent circumstances. My conscience falsifies not an iota; for my knowledge I cannot answer.
This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.
Now there cannot be first principles for men, unless the Divinity has revealed them; all the rest--beginning, middle, and end--isnothing but dreams and smoke.
The share we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is, has not been acquired by our own powers. God has taught ushis wonderful secrets; our faith is not of our acquiring, it is purely the gift of another's bounty.
I do not correct my first imaginings by my second--well, yes, perhaps a word or so, but only to vary, not to delete. I want to represent the course of my humors and I want people to see each part at its birth.
I, who am king of the matter I treat, and who owe an accounting for it to no one, do not for all that believe myself in all I write. I often hazard sallies of my mind which I mistrust.
And if nobody reads me, shall I have wasted my time, when I have beguiled so many idle hours with such pleasant and profitable reflections?
Men of simple understanding, little inquisitive and little instructed, make good Christians.
An orator of past times declared that his calling was to make small things appear to be grand.
A good marriage (if any there be) refuses the conditions of love and endeavors to present those of amity.