Essays
Montaigne created the word essay the genre as well: the word means an attempt at something, here they are attempts to characterize himself. Each essay has some topic, like “On Solitude” or “On Practice”, but most of them are simply free-flowing discourses filled with anecdotes that often reveal more about the writer than about the topics themselves. Within them, Montaigne’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Greco-Roman classics made me feel like a toddler in comparison – but despite this, most anecdotes are given with context and Montaigne more often uses those anecdotes to make points salient rather than to confuse. Over the month I spent reading, he seemed like a really affable brother who jumps from criticizing Roman orators to making poop jokes to philosophizing on animals’ intelligence. There is always a charming combination of erudite wit and practical humility in the essays, and in reading I felt as if I had made a friend rather than listened to a lecture.
Being surrounded by Montaigne’s ideas during my month of reading, there was a fascinating theme that came about: a humble, natural egalitarianism (which is interesting and odd particularly since Montaigne was born with privilege: as a noble, as a man, as someone who could have time to sit in a tower and contemplate ideas). His egalitarianism extends to all facets of life and nature: in “On some lines of Virgil” he expounds on the relative equality of men and women, of how upbringing and social factors created all the difference. In his “Apology for Raymond Sebond”, he tells of how so many animals show rationality and intelligence in their own ways, and the fact that humans colonized and domesticated them doesn’t grant us any intrinsic superiority over animals, many of whom have abilities that should deeply humble us. In “On experience”, he explains that no matter if a person is a king or a beggar, the most glorious task would be to live and enjoy nature’s bounties like eating plain but nourishing food, readily available to anyone who tries to looks for them. Together they form a foundation for accepting and perhaps celebrating nature. Montaigne’s influences in naturalism from the Greeks lead him down this road, and it’s a path that I personally have treaded on and off often (probably from the same Stoic and Epicurean influences that affected Montaigne). It’s why I would often transport bugs out of the house instead of killing them even if killing is so much easier: because even the stinkbugs and spiders survived to this day, and those little critters are evolutionary miracles, my (very) distant brothers and sisters that have their own place; while nature should let me live, I feel obligated to reciprocate and let live its other creations.
% grep -i "essays" quotes.txt20 matches
on passion
“Coldness in mistresses is most painful, but in very truth compliance and availability are even more so; that is because the yearning which is born in us from the high opinion in which we hold the object of our love sharpens our love, and the choler similarly makes it hot; but satiety engenders a feeling of insipidness; our passions then is blunted, hesitant, weary and half-asleep”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.15)
on modesty
“What is the purpose of that artful maidenly modesty, that poised coldness, that severe countenance, that professed ignorance of things they know better than we do who are teaching them to them, if not to increase our desire to vanquish, overcome, and bend to our passion all those conventional obstacles? For there is not only pleasure in making that sweet gentleness and that girlish modesty go mad with sensual desire but glory as well as in reducing a proud and imperious gravity to the mercy of our ardor”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.15)
on control
“Real effective subordination only concerns those who welcome it and who love to gain honor and wealth by such servitude; the man who is content to squat by his hearth and who knows how to govern his household without squabbles or law-suits is as free as the Duke of Venice”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I:42)
on trust
“For a life ambitious for fame, a man must, on the contrary, yield little to suspicions and keep them on a tight rein; fear and distrust attract hostile actions: it invites them”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I.24)
on groups
“Those ‘savages’ are only wild in the sense that we call fruits wild when they are produced by Nature in her ordinary course: whereas it is fruit which we have artificially perverted and misled from the common order which we ought to call savage… It is not sensible that artifice should be reverenced more than Nature, our great and powerful Mother”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I:31)
on diversion
“Our most great and glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly. Everything else – reigning, building, laying up treasure – are at most tiny props and small accessories. I delight in coming across a general in the field, at the foot of a breach which he means soon to attack, giving himself whole-heartedly to his dinner while chatting freely with his friends, or across Brutus, with heaven and earth conspiring against him and the liberty of Rome, stealing an evening hour from his rounds of duty to jot down notes on his Polybius as he read him with complete composure. It is for petty souls overwhelmed by the weight of affairs to be unable to disentangle themselves from them completely, not knowing how to drop them and take them up again”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (III.13)
on diversion
“Some painful idea gets hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than subdue it. If I cannot substitute an opposite one for it, I can at least find a different one. Change always solaces it, dissolves it and dispels it. If I cannot fight it, I flee it; and by my flight I made a diversion and use craft; by changing place, occupation and company I escape from it into the crowd of other pastimes and cogitations, in which it loses all track of me and cannot find me”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (III.4)
on happiness
“The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so but he who believes he is so; in that way alone does belief endow itself with true reality”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I.14)
on fraternity and constancy
“We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.1)
on pleasure
“If a hangover came before we got drunk we would see that we never drank to excess; but pleasure, to deceive us, walks in front and hides her train”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I:39)
on fortune
“In this world’s activities we often notice that Fortune rivals Virtue: she shows us what power she has over everything and delights in striking down our presumption by making the incompetent lucky since she cannot make them wise”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (III.8)
on punishment
“[Seneca notes that] punishments sharpen our vices rather than blunt them; they do not engender a concern to do good (which is the result of reason and self-discipline) but only a concern to not be found out doing wrong”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.15)
on bias
“Nobody keeps a record of their erroneous prophecies since they are infinite and everyday; right predictions are prized precisely because they are rare, unbelievable and marvelous”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I.11)
on erudition
“The truly wise are like ears of corn: they shoot up and up holding their heads proudly erect – so long as they are empty; but when, in their maturity, they are full of swelling grain, their foreheads droop and they show humility”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.12)
on fortune
“It is madness to expect that Fortune will ever supply us with enough weapons to use against herself”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (I.14)
on frivolity
“To excite our souls we need no causes: they can be controlled and excited by some raving disembodied fancy based on nothing”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (III.4)
on chastity
“Both men and women are capable of hundreds of kinds of corrupt activities more damaging than lasciviousness and more disnatured. But men make things into vices and weigh them not according to their nature but our self-interest: that is why they take on so many unfair forms. The ferocity of men’s decrees about lasciviousness makes the devotion of women to it more vicious and ferocious than its characteristics warrant, and engages in it consequences which are worse than their cause”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (III.5)
on philosophy
“Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with, so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keep to accept in payment”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.12)
on philosophy
“I have always felt grateful to that girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philosopher Thales with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, made him trip over, to warn him that it was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet. It was good advice she gave him, to study himself rather than the sky… No philosopher understands his neighbor’s actions nor even his own; he does not even know what either of them is in himself, beast or Man”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.12)
on sophistry
“There are so many ways of taking anything, that it is hard for a clever mind not to find in almost any subject something or other which appears to serve his point, directly or indirectly. That explains why an opaque, ambiguous style has been so long in vogue. All an author needs to do is to attract the concern and attention of posterity. Numerous minds will get out their sieves, sifting and forcing any number of ideas through them, some of them relevant, some off the point, some flat contradictory to his intentions, but all doing him honor. He will grow rich out of his students’ resources – like dons being paid their midsummer fees at the Lendit fair”
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays (II.12)