Essais De Montaigne (self-Édition) - Volume I
1907
Essais De Montaigne (self-Édition) - Volume I
1907
Translated by Michaud
Montaigne invented the essay, and in doing so, he invented a way of thinking. Written in the late 16th century by a French nobleman who withdrew from public life to sit alone with his books and his thoughts, these pages read like a man talking to himself, and somehow, across four centuries, making you feel less alone in your own mind. He writes about everything: the strangeness of war-horses and the strangeness of cannibals, the folly of politics and the gravity of death, the body and the soul, friendship and solitude. But beneath this vast curiosity lies one irreducible project: to know himself, and through knowing himself, to know what it means to be human. The result is neither a philosophy treatise nor a memoir but something stranger and more alive, a continuous conversation with a mind so honest it still feels radical. For anyone who's ever felt the strange comfort of reading exactly what they were thinking but couldn't say, Montaigne remains the patron saint.
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“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.””
— Michel de Montaigne
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.””
— Michel de Montaigne
“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.””
— Michel de Montaigne
“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.””
— Michel de Montaigne
“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.””
— Michel de Montaigne
“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.””
— Michel de Montaigne
“If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.””
— Michel de Montaigne
“Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.””
— Michel de Montaigne
“I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.””
— Michel de Montaigne
