Essays of Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), 1580
A sixteenth-century nobleman examines friendship, death, custom and his own kidney stones, using himself as the evidence. It reads like a long, clever conversation with a frank friend. A curious, witty voice wanders through friendship, death, custom and kidney stones, thinking aloud at an unhurried pace.
Feels like curiosity, humor and tenderness. About identity, morality and society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy frank, digressive reflection and don't mind a writer who uses himself as the main case study. The sixteenth-century English and long, winding sentences can make some passages slow going, so sample a few pages first.
Why read it
Montaigne shows how to think honestly about ordinary experience, and his self-questioning still gives you a companionable way to examine your own habits and opinions.
Pages from the book
The longer you study yourself, the stranger the subject becomes.
‘Tis wonderful from how many idle beginnings and frivolous causes such famous impressions commonly, proceed. This it is that obstructs information; for whilst we seek out causes and solid and weighty ends, worthy of so great a name, we lose the true ones; they escape our sight by their littleness. And, in truth, a very prudent, diligent, and subtle inquisition is required in such searches, indifferent, and not prepossessed. To this very hour, all these miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me: I have never seen greater monster or miracle in the world than myself: one grows familiar with all strange things by time and custom, but the more I frequent and the better I know myself, the more does my own deformity astonish me, the less I understand myself. Must suffering be silent to count as courage?
As to the rest, I have always found the precept that so rigorously enjoins a resolute countenance and disdainful and indifferent comportment in the toleration of infirmities to be ceremonial. Why should philosophy, which only has respect to life and effects, trouble itself about these external appearances? Let us leave that care to actors and masters of rhetoric, who set so great a value upon our gestures. Let her allow this vocal frailty to disease, if it be neither cordial nor stomachic, and permit the ordinary ways of expressing grief by sighs, sobs, palpitations, and turning pale, that nature has put out of our power; provided the courage be undaunted, and the tones not expressive of despair, let her be satisfied. What matter the wringing of our hands, if we do not wring our thoughts? Even when you are ill, there is something sad about wanting nothing.
I am sorry when I am sick, that I have not some longing that might give me the pleasure of satisfying it; all the rules of physic would hardly be able to divert me from it. I do the same when I am well; I can see very little more to be hoped or wished for. ‘Twere pity a man should be so weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him. Michel de Montaigne.In 1571 Montaigne retired to a tower at his château and had around fifty Greek and Latin sayings painted on the beams of his library ceiling.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Essays of Michel de Montaigne for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy frank, digressive reflection and don't mind a writer who uses himself as the main case study. The sixteenth-century English and long, winding sentences can make some passages slow going, so sample a few pages first.
- What is Essays of Michel de Montaigne like?
- A curious, witty voice wanders through friendship, death, custom and kidney stones, thinking aloud at an unhurried pace. Feels like curiosity, humor and tenderness. About identity, morality and society.
- What should I read after Essays of Michel de Montaigne?
- If you liked Essays of Michel de Montaigne, try Dialogues (Plato), The Counterfeiters (André Gide) and The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (Francis Bacon).
A taste of the feed
The relief of discovering you owe nothing to the people who raised you.
Owing to an accidental discovery I happened to make this afternoon, I have become aware that I must cease to regard you as my father. This is an immense relief to me. Realizing as I do how little affection I feel for you, I have for a long time past been thinking myself an unnatural son; I prefer knowing I am not your son at all.
The Counterfeiters · André Gide
How hard it is to believe that other people are as real as you are.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.
Middlemarch · George Eliot
How to describe a massacre as though reviewing a parade.
There was never anything so gallant, so spruce, so brilliant, and so well disposed as the two armies. Trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon made music such as Hell itself had never heard. The cannons first of all laid flat about six thousand men on each side; the muskets swept away from this best of worlds nine or ten thousand ruffians who infested its surface. The bayonet was also a sufficient reason for the death of several thousands. The whole might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery.
Candide · Voltaire
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