Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)
Influential French Renaissance writer, generally considered to be the inventor of the personal essay.
We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
Virtue refuses facility for her companion ... the easy, gentle, and sloping path that guides the footsteps of a good natural disposition is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.
Confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
Montaigne the I-sayer. “I” as space, not as position.
Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.
The hedonistic approach to education did make a difference to him. Having been guided early in life by his own curiosity alone, he grew up to be an independent-minded adult, following his own path in everything rather than deferring to duty and discipline.
Ceux qui ont apparié notre vie ? un songe ont eu de la raison...Nous veillons dormants et veillants dormons.
No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.
We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.
Combien de choses nous servoyent hier d’articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd’huy?
Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest.
Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.
L'homme est bien insensé. Il ne saurait forger un ciron, et forge des Dieux ? douzaines.
What the earliest utopians—Montaigne, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella—understood was that they fought not for a place but for a new set of ideas through which to recognize what would count as Real: Equality, not hierarchical authority. Individual dignity, not slavish subservience. Our preeminent problem is that we recognize the Real in what is most deadly: a culture of duty to legalities that are, finally, cruel and destructive. We need to work inventively—as Christ did, as Thoreau did—in the spirit of disobedience for the purpose of refusing the social order into which we happen to have been born and putting in its place a culture of life-giving things.
Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.
Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend.
Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid.