Essays of Michel De Montaigne — Volume 13
1580
Essays of Michel De Montaigne — Volume 13
1580
Translated by Charles Cotton
In 1572, a French nobleman retreated to his tower library to escape the world and, in doing so, invented something extraordinary: the essay. Michel de Montaigne spent his remaining years penning observations so frank, so curious, so deliberately personal that they revolutionized literature. He studied himself as others study ancient texts, mining his own contradictions for insight into human nature itself. This volume collects his most intimate philosophical investigations, from impassioned defenses of Seneca and Plutarch to restless meditations on love, ambition, patience, and the strange motives that drive us. Montaigne reads like a friend in your study at midnight, pulling down books to argue a point, then undercutting himself with a confession. Four centuries later, his essays remain astonishingly vital: not because he found answers, but because he showed us how beautifully human it is to keep searching.
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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
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Montaigne, Michel de. Essays of Michel De Montaigne — Volume 13. Lex, lex-books.com/book/essays-of-michel-de-montaigne-volume-13-10486513-32b4-4374-9605-9ed0e9422f23.Montaigne, M. D. (1580). Essays of Michel De Montaigne — Volume 13. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/essays-of-michel-de-montaigne-volume-13-10486513-32b4-4374-9605-9ed0e9422f23Montaigne, Michel de. Essays of Michel De Montaigne — Volume 13. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/essays-of-michel-de-montaigne-volume-13-10486513-32b4-4374-9605-9ed0e9422f23.
