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
I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.
Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.
The first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die ... and to live.
It is not a mind, it is not a body that we educate, but it is a man, and we must not make two parts of him.
Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness.
The worth of the mind consisteth not in going high, but in marching orderly.
I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.
It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.
Perhaps it is not without reason that we attribute facility in belief and conviction to simplicity and ignorance; for it seems to me I once learned that belief was sort of an impression made on our mind, and that the softer it is the less resistant t.
I had rather fashion my mind than furnish it.
It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength.