Quotes About Montaigne

I THINK IT IS MONTAIGNE who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head

sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. He once quipped, "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and this means a short roll call of names; Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epicurus, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.

For Montaigne, the death of youth, which so often takes place unnoticed is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as 'death' is no more than the death of old age...The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth crabbed and regretful age.

And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?

I stood there in the whirling summer,My hand capped a withered heart,And thought of China and of Greece,Of Alexander in his tent;Of Montaigne in his tower,Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.

O human creature,you are the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and all in all, the fool of the farce.

I can do no better than quote Montaigne: "All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.

Montaigne: "All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed." PART 1

In Montaigne's redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one's mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philosophers and mistake Scipios. A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

Setting people examination papers measuring wisdom rather than learning would probably result in an immediate realignment of the hierarchy of intelligence – and a surprising new élite. Montaigne delighted in the prospect of the incongruous people who would now be recognized as cleverer than the lauded but often unworthy traditional candidates.

We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.

Montaigne wrote that death itself is nothing. It is only the fear of death that makes death seem important.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.

human nature" had, of course, been going on for some time. The earliest examples of "natural men" had been the American Indians. It had been they who had provided Montaigne with much of the material he had used to cast doubt on the civility and humanity of his Christian contemporaries, both Catholic and Protestant, and to suggest that, after all, "barbarian" might be nothing more than a word we use to describe what is unfamiliar to us.

Montaigne: "To practice death is to practice freedom.71 A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave." Being a slave to our job and our status in the world makes it much harder to put our day behind us and surrender to sleep.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

Is it not enough to make me come back to life out of spite, to have someone who spat in my face while I existed come and rub my feet when I am beginning to exist no longer?

to cite Montaigne, "Nature always gives us happier laws than those we give ourselves."125

I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures." —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

As Montaigne wrote, observing late-sixteenth-century life, "To die of age is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death, and so much less natural than others: it is the last and extremest kind of dying.

Wilson was very much school of Montaigne. Like Montaigne, he was not exactly misogynistic but he felt that the challenge of another male mind was the highest sort of human exchange while possession of a beautiful woman was also of intense importance to him.

As Michel de Montaigne observed, The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced. p 233