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
Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.
I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
I quote others in order to better express myself.
When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly.
Getting married is very much like going to a restaurant with friends. You order what you want then when you see what the other person has, you wish you had ordered that.
It is a rare life that remains orderly even in private.
The worth of the mind consisteth not in going high, but in marching orderly.
The general order of things that takes care of fleas and moles also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself.
There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline.
It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.
Pythagoras used to say that life resembles the Olympic Games: a few people strain their muscles to carry off a prize; others bring trinkets to sell to the crowd for gain; and some there are, and not the worst, who seek no other profit than to look at the show and see how and why everything is done; spectators of the life of other people in order to judge and regulate their own.
The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.
In order always to learn something from others (which is the finest school there can be), I observe in my travels this practice: I always steer those with whom I talk back to the things they know best.
There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge.