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Considered the inventor of the essay itself, Michel de Montaigne published Essays (Essais, literally "Attempts") in 1850. Known for his skill at merging serious intellectual debate with personal anecdotes, his vast work collects together some of the most influential essays the world has ever seen, shaping the thoughts Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stefan Zweig, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Isaac Asimov among others. Montaigne stated that his aim in writing these works was to describe humankind, including himself, with complete frankness.… (more)
I can no longer tolerate reading the ramblings of this contemptible Frenchman. Montaigne isn't a renaissance intellectual by a long shot, he's a remnant of the 14th century man, a smug asshole wallowing in the pitch black murk of the dark ages, and worst of all a complete hypocrite and a bootlicker of the catholic church. Funny how he kept gatekeeping others from reading the Bible and discouraged the publication of vernacular Bible translations while citing biblical verses from a translated secondary source in his essays, his style was overly pompous and wordy, but Montaigne made denigrating the excessively ornate style of the humanist poets of his age a predominant subject in his essays, he did not care whether his writings would sound idiotically asinine to his readers, no, Montaigne only cared about churning one absurd string of foolish platitudes after another, he couldn't refrain from writing down one essay without letting self-contradiction seep into the next one, and as a final nail in the coffin, he gratuitously slandered homosexuals and cited the worst instances of historical homoromanticism to justify his atrociously close-minded stance on love in his appalling essay on friendship and romantic love. If I'll ever have the chance of visiting Montaigne's grave, I'd spit on this humongous jerk's tomb and hope I would never be cursed with the misfortune of hearing his name again. Here's one final big duck you to this medieval jackass. ( )
“Let us not look for our disease outside of ourselves; it is within us, it is planted in our entrails. And the very fact that we do not realize that we are sick makes our cure more difficult. If we do not soon begin to tend ourselves, when will we have provided for so many sores and so many maladies? Yet we have a very sweet medicine in philosophy. For of the others we feel the pleasure only after the cure; this one pleases and cures at the same time.”
This, reader, is an honest book. It warns you at the outset that my sole purpose in writing it has been a private and domestic one.
The most usual way to soften the hearts of those we have offended, when having vengeance in their hand, they hold us at their mercy, is to move them by submission to commiseration and pity; defiance, courage, and resolution—ans altogether different—have sometimes served the same purpose.
Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory.
Quotations
Last words
Frui paratis et valido mihi / Latoë, dones, et, precor, integra / Cum mente; nec turpem senectam / Degere, nec Cithara carentem.
Grant, I pray, son of Latona, that I enjoy in full health, and with mind unimpaired, the goods that have been prepared for me; and that my old age be not unhonoured, nor lack the lyre.
Considered the inventor of the essay itself, Michel de Montaigne published Essays (Essais, literally "Attempts") in 1850. Known for his skill at merging serious intellectual debate with personal anecdotes, his vast work collects together some of the most influential essays the world has ever seen, shaping the thoughts Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stefan Zweig, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Isaac Asimov among others. Montaigne stated that his aim in writing these works was to describe humankind, including himself, with complete frankness.
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Legacy Library: Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
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Montaigne's Essays, one at a time.
Wikipedia in English (2)
