Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3347

For it is just you should remember that both I who speak and you who are to judge, are men; so that if probable things are delivered, you shall require and expect no more.” Aristotle ordinarily heaps up a great number of other men’s opinions and beliefs, to compare them with his own, and to let us see how much he has gone beyond them, and how much nearer he approaches to the likelihood of truth; for truth is not to be judged by the authority and testimony of others; which made Epicurus religiously avoid quoting them in his writings.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 5319

It goes side by side with me in my whole course, and everywhere is assisting me: it comforts me in old age and solitude; it eases me of a troublesome weight of idleness, and delivers me at all hours from company that I dislike: it blunts the point of griefs, if they are not extreme, and have not got an entire possession of my soul.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 519

Still, these excesses excepted, the knowledge of courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study. It is, like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first sight, and in the very beginning of acquaintance; and, consequently, that which first opens the door and intromits us to instruct ourselves by the example of others, and to give examples ourselves, if we have any worth taking notice of and communicating.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 4654

they attack his shadow, and drive the storm in a place where no one is either chastised or concerned, but in the clamour of their voice. I likewise in quarrels condemn those who huff and vapour without an enemy: those rhodomontades should be reserved to discharge upon the offending party:

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3152

The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes; the same reason that makes us whip a lackey, falling into the hands of a king makes him ruin a whole province. They are as lightly moved as we, but they are able to do more. In a gnat and an elephant the passion is the same.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 4057

“Whilst I was passing over the happy and last day of my life, I write this, but, at the same time, afflicted with such pain in my bladder and bowels that nothing can be greater, but it was recompensed with the pleasure the remembrance of my inventions and doctrines brought to my soul. Now, as the affection thou hast ever from thy infancy borne towards me and philosophy requires, take upon thee the protection of Metrodorus’ children.”

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3369

I cannot easily persuade myself that Epicurus, Plato, and Pytagoras, have given us their atom, idea and numbers, for current pay. They were too wise to establish their articles of faith upon things so disputable and uncertain. But in that obscurity and ignorance in which the world then was, every one of these great men endeavoured to present some kind of image or reflection of light, and worked their brains for inventions that might have a pleasant and subtle appearance; provided that, though false, they might make good their ground against those that would oppose them. _Unicuique ista pro ingenio finguntur, non ex scientiæ vi._ “These things every one fancies according to his wit, and not by any power of knowledge.”

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 5061

What we have not seen, we are forced to receive from other hands Whatever was not ordinary diet, was instead of a drug Whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead Who does not boast of some rare recipe Who ever saw one physician approve of another’s prescription Willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead With being too well I am about to die Wont to give others their life, and not to receive it You may indeed make me die an ill death

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 4759

[“And as a stone torn from the mountain’s top by the wind or rain torrents, or loosened by age, falls massive with mighty force, bounds here and there, in its course sweeps from the earth with it woods, herds, and men.”--AEneid, xii. 684.]

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 5789

To conclude this notable commentary, which has escaped from me in a torrent of babble, a torrent sometimes impetuous and hurtful,

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 7055

Custom also makes me hope better for the time to come; for, the conduct of this clearing out having so long continued, ‘tis to be believed that nature will not alter her course, and that no other worse accident will happen than what I already feel.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3434

The Carthaginians immolated their own children to Saturn; and those who had none of their own bought of others, the father and mother being in the mean time obliged to assist at the ceremony with a gay and contented countenance.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 1041

And, in truth, in persons of mean and low condition, it cannot perform its true and genuine office, being naturally more prompt to assist in the conduct of war, in the government of peoples, in negotiating the leagues and friendships of princes and foreign nations, than in forming a syllogism in logic, in pleading a process in law, or in prescribing a dose of pills in physic.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 4073

“Vera et sapiens animi magnitudo, honestum illud, quod maxime naturam sequitur, in factis positum, non in gloria, judicat.”

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 2080

We call a horse entire, that has his mane and ears so, and no other will pass muster. The Lacedaemonians, having defeated the Athenians in Sicily, returning triumphant from the victory into the city of Syracuse, amongst other insolences, caused all the horses they had taken to be shorn and led in triumph. Alexander fought with a nation called Dahas, whose discipline it was to march two and two together armed on one horse, to the war; and being in fight, one of them alighted, and so they fought on horseback and on foot, one after another by turns.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 1846

A straight oar seems crooked in the water it does not only import that we see the thing, but how and after what manner we see it.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 6973

I have lived long enough to be able to give an account of the custom that has carried me so far; for him who has a mind to try it, as his taster, I have made the experiment. Here are some of the articles, as my memory shall supply me with them; I have no custom that has not varied according to circumstances; but I only record those that I have been best acquainted with, and that hitherto have had the greatest possession of me.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 4929

All means that conduce to health can neither be too painful nor too dear to me. But I have some other appearances that make me strangely suspect all this merchandise.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 6642

I have seen the birth of many miracles in my time; which, although they were abortive, yet have we not failed to foresee what they would have come to, had they lived their full age. ‘Tis but finding the end of the clew, and a man may wind off as much as he will; and there is a greater distance betwixt nothing and the least thing in the world than there is betwixt this and the greatest. Now the first that are imbued with this beginning of novelty, when they set out with their tale, find, by the oppositions they meet with, where the difficulty of persuasion lies, and so caulk up that place with some false piece;

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3050

For to attribute this to a mere quickness of the sense of hearing, without reason and consequence, is a chimæra that cannot enter into the imagination. We are to suppose the same of the many sorts of subtleties and inventions with which beasts secure themselves from, and frustrate, the enterprizes we plot against them.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3122

Animals are much more regular than we, and keep themselves with greater moderation within the limits nature has prescribed; but yet not so exactly that they have not sometimes an analogy with our debauches.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 6709

I have been pleased, in places where I have been, to see men in devotion vow ignorance as well as chastity, poverty, and penitence: ‘tis also a gelding of our unruly appetites, to blunt this cupidity that spurs us on to the study of books, and to deprive the soul of this voluptuous complacency that tickles us with the opinion of knowledge: and ‘tis plenarily to accomplish the vow of poverty, to add unto it that of the mind.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 4567

Therefore it was, that being sometime taken in his house sharply scolding with his sister, and being reproached that he therein transgressed his own rules of indifference: “What!” said he, “must this bit of a woman also serve for a testimony to my rules?” Another time, being seen to defend himself against a dog: “It is,” said he, “very hard totally to put off man; and we must endeavour and force ourselves to resist and encounter things, first by effects, but at least by reason and argument.”

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 4487

But let us a little lengthen this chapter, and add another anecdote concerning blindness. Pliny reports of one who, dreaming he was blind, found himself so indeed in the morning without any preceding infirmity in his eyes. The force of imagination might assist in this case, as I have said elsewhere, and Pliny seems to be of the same opinion; but it is more likely that the motions which the body felt within, of which physicians, if they please, may find out the cause, taking away his sight, were the occasion of his dream.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 5032

There are so many maladies and so many circumstances presented to him, that before he can attain the certainty of the point to which the perfection of his experience should arrive, human sense will be at the end of its lesson: and before he can, amongst this infinity of things, find out what this horn is; amongst so many diseases, what is epilepsy; the many complexions in a melancholy person; the many seasons in winter; the many nations in the French; the many ages in age; the many celestial mutations in the conjunction of Venus and Saturn; the many parts in man’s body, nay, in a finger; and being, in all this, directed neither by argument, conjecture, example, nor divine inspirations, but merely by the sole motion of fortune, it must be by a perfectly artificial, regular and methodical fortune.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 4477

Popilius came to him from the Senate, and at their first meeting refused to take him by the hand, till he had first read his letters, which after the king had read, and told him he would consider of them, Popilius made a circle about him with his cane, saying:--“Return me an answer, that I may carry it back to the Senate, before thou stirrest out of this circle.” Antiochus, astonished at the roughness of so positive a command, after a little pause, replied, “I will obey the Senate’s command.” Then Popilius saluted him as friend of the Roman people.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 906

This over-circumspect and wary prudence is a mortal enemy to all high and generous exploits. Scipio, to sound Syphax’s intention, leaving his army, abandoning Spain, not yet secure nor well settled in his new conquest, could pass over into Africa in two small ships, to commit himself, in an enemy’s country, to the power of a barbarian king, to a faith untried and unknown, without obligation, without hostage, under the sole security of the grandeur of his own courage, his good fortune, and the promise of his high hopes.--[ Livy, xxviii. 17.]

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 2903

[“He makes them wear the silent chains of brutes, the bloodthirsty souls he encloses in bears, the thieves in wolves, the deceivers in foxes; where, after successive years and a thousand forms, man had spent his life, and after purgation in Lethe’s flood, at last he restores them to the primordial human shapes.” --Claudian, In Ruf., ii. 482.]

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 2002

[“He is not readily beaten who provokes the enemy by shewing his throat.”--or: “He who presents himself to his foe, sells his life dear.”--Lucan, iv. 275.]

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 324

Such as accuse mankind of the folly of gaping after future things, and advise us to make our benefit of those which are present, and to set up our rest upon them, as having no grasp upon that which is to come, even less than that which we have upon what is past, have hit upon the most universal of human errors, if that may be called an error to which nature herself has disposed us, in order to the continuation of her own work, prepossessing us, amongst several others, with this deceiving imagination, as being more jealous of our action than afraid of our knowledge.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3642

Let us omit the Stoics, (_usuram nobis largiuntur tanquam cornicibus; diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper, negant._ “They give us a long life, as also they do to crows; they say our soul shall continue long, but that it shall continue always they deny,”) who give to souls a life after this, but finite.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 6928

[“What god may govern with skill this dwelling of the world? whence rises the monthly moon, whither wanes she? how is it that her horns are contracted and reopen? whence do winds prevail on the main? what does the east wind court with its blasts? and whence are the clouds perpetually supplied with water? is a day to come which may undermine the world?”--Propertius, iii. 5, 26.]

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 5624

[“Mars, the god of wars, who controls the cruel tasks of war, often reclines on thy bosom, and greedily drinks love at both his eyes, vanquished by the eternal wound of love: and his breath, as he reclines, hangs on thy lips; bending thy head over him as he lies upon thy sacred person, pour forth sweet and persuasive words.” --Lucretius, i. 23.]

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3108

This is a miraculous force; but ‘tis not useless to the cramp-fish; she knows it, and makes use on’t; for, to catch the prey she desires, she will bury herself in the mud, that other fishes swimming over her, struck and benumbed with this coldness of hers, may fall into her power. Cranes, swallows, and other birds of passage, by shifting their abode according to the seasons, sufficiently manifest the knowledge they have of their divining faculty, and put it in use.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 1872

“Regibus hic mos est: ubi equos mercantur, opertos Inspiciunt; ne, si facies, ut saepe, decora Molli fulta pede est, emptorem inducat hiantem”

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 1819

I except payments where the trouble of bargaining and reckoning is required; and in such cases; where I can meet with nobody to ease me of that charge, I delay them, how scandalously and injuriously soever, all I possibly can, for fear of the wranglings for which both my humour and way of speaking are so totally improper and unfit.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 166

“I have never yet failed,” returned I, “to have the honour of hearing your conceptions and imaginations communicated to me; will you not now still let me enjoy them?” “I would indeed,” he answered; “but, my brother, I am not able to do so; they are admirable, infinite, and unspeakable.” We stopped short there, for he could not go on.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 681

[“Know you not that, when dead, there can be no other living self to lament you dead, standing on your grave.”--Idem., ibid., 898.]

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3196

The Indians paint it black and tawny, with great swelled lips, wide flat noses and load the cartilage betwixt the nostrils with great rings of gold, to make it hang down to the mouth; as also the under lip with great hoops, enriched with precious stones, that weigh them down to fall upon the chin, it being with them a singular grace to show their teeth, even below the roots. In Peru the greatest ears are the most beautiful, which they stretch out as far as they can by art.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 7054

For want of natural memory, I make one of paper; and as any new symptom happens in my disease, I set it down, whence it falls out that, having now almost passed through all sorts of examples, if anything striking threatens me, turning over these little loose notes, as the Sybilline leaves, I never fail of finding matter of consolation from some favourable prognostic in my past experience.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3056

I do not think that servants of the most abject condition would willingly do that for their masters that princes think it an honour to do for their beasts. Diogenes seeing his relations solicitous to redeem, him from servitude: “They are fools,” said he; “‘tis he that keeps and nourishes me that in reality serves me.” And they who entertain beasts ought rather to be said to serve them, than to be served by them.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 2470

I was just now reading this passage where Plutarch says of himself, that Rusticus being present at a declamation of his at Rome, there received a packet from the emperor, and deferred to open it till all was done: for which, says he, all the company highly applauded the gravity of this person.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3307

The same has fallen out to men truly wise, which befalls the ears of corn; they shoot and raise their heads high and pert, whilst empty; but when full and swelled with grain in maturity, begin to flag and droop. So men, having tried and sounded all things, and having found in that mass of knowledge, and provision of so many various things, nothing solid and firm, and nothing but vanity, have quitted their presumption, and acknowledged their natural condition.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 6436

Betwixt Caesar and Pompey, I should frankly have declared myself; but, as amongst the three robbers who came after,--[Octavius, Mark Antony, and Lepidus.]--a man must have been necessitated either to hide himself, or have gone along with the current of the time, which I think one may fairly do when reason no longer guides:

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3518

The mind of man falls into as great a depth, and is after the same manner bruised and shattered by his own rashness. If you ask of philosophy of what matter the heavens and the sun are? what answer will she return, if not that it is iron, or, with Anaxagoras, stone, or some other matter that she makes use of? If a man inquire of Zeno what nature is?

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 2222

Neither is it a book for everyone to fist, but the study of select men set apart for that purpose, and whom Almighty God has been pleased to call to that office and sacred function: the wicked and ignorant grow worse by it. ‘Tis, not a story to tell, but a history to revere, fear, and adore. Are not they then pleasant men who think they have rendered this fit for the people’s handling by translating it into the vulgar tongue? Does the understanding of all therein contained only stick at words?

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 7116

Nothing but hardness generally offends me (of any other quality I am as patient and indifferent as any man I have known); so that, contrary to the common humour, even in fish it often happens that I find them both too fresh and too firm; not for want of teeth, which I ever had good, even to excellence, and which age does not now begin to threaten; I have always been used every morning to rub them with a napkin, and before and after dinner.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 3411

And yet some amongst us are fallen into the like error, promising to themselves after the resurrection a terrestrial and temporal life, accompanied with all sorts of worldly conveniences and pleasures. Can we believe that Plato, he who had such heavenly conceptions, and was so well acquainted with the Divinity as thence to derive the name of the Divine Plato, ever thought that the poor creature, man, had any thing in him applicable to that incomprehensible power?

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 1710

Upon this subject of letters, I will add this more to what has been already said, that it is a kind of writing wherein my friends think I can do something; and I am willing to confess I should rather have chosen to publish my whimsies that way than any other, had I had to whom to write; but I wanted such a settled intercourse, as I once had, to attract me to it, to raise my fancy, and to support me.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne, passage 1748

He says that this produced a most horrid spectacle the natural affection betwixt the parents and their children, and moreover their zeal to their ancient belief, contending against this violent decree, fathers and mothers were commonly seen making themselves away, and by a yet much more rigorous example, precipitating out of love and compassion their young children into wells and pits, to avoid the severity of this law.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Install Darobodo