"Montaigne" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is taken, you see, from nature. It is a good remark of Montaigne's, that the wisest men often hare friends with whom they do not care how much they play the fool. Take my present follies as instances of my regard. Poetry is a much easier and more agreeable species of composition than prose; and could a man live by it, it were not ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... charming, but so close is the valley in which the town lies, that it is a veritable hothouse, and the reverse, we should think, of what an invalid wants. Plombires has always had illustrious visitors—Montaigne, who upon several occasions took the waters here—Maupertuis, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, the Empress Josephine, and a host of historic personages. But the emperor may be called the creator of Plombires. The park, the fine road to Remiremont, the handsome Bain Napoleon (now National), the church, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... dance their allotted round and fill the ordained space, while Ignorance masquerades in the garb of criticism, and Folly proffers her ancient epilogue of chastened hope. When all is said, nothing is said; and Montaigne's Que scais-je, besides being briefer and wittier, was infinitely ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... y alt, tout s'enveloppe sous le nom de salade; de mesme, sous la consideration des noms, je m'en voys faire icy une galimafree de divers articles." (Montaigne, Essais, i. 46.) ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... never can change or suspend them! Who shall assure us that our experience of these laws does not differ from that of Peter and John, the Apostles? How much better to say of them with Hume, Whatever the fact, we cannot believe it, or to query with Montaigne, Que sais-je? Far better might we say that human experience can never overthrow faith in the supernatural, for none can ever say what has been the experience of the countless dead over whom oblivion broods. Shall a few ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... opposite laws of the Code and Pandects, are sometimes the cause, and often the excuse, of the glorious uncertainty of the civil law, which so often affords what Montaigne calls "Questions pour l'Ami." See a fine passage of Franciscus Balduinus in Justinian, (l. ii. p. 259, &c., ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... there had never existed either Voltaire, or Montaigne, or Pascal, or Swift, or Kant, or Spinoza, or hundreds of other writers who have exposed, with great force, the madness and futility of war, and have described its cruelty, immorality, and savagery; and, above all, it is as if there had never existed Jesus and ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... the innocent days of this ancient and outworn sportsman; to-day there was no weeding, usually there is however, edged in somewhere. My books for the moment are a crib to Phaedo, and the second book of Montaigne; and a little while back I was reading Frederic Harrison, Choice of Books, etc.—very good indeed, a great deal of sense and knowledge in the volume, and some very true stuff, contra Carlyle, about the eighteenth ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seemed to have been gathered together as it happened, possibly as he came on them, in no sense an index of individual taste. There were poets (strange company they made for one another!) Milton, Ossian, Byron, Thompson, Herrick, and the Essays of Montaigne, the Confessions of Rousseau. Also, the Age of Reason, which, on the testimony of uncut leaves, had not been read. And there was a worn, dog-eared Bible. Raven had never wanted to appropriate the books so far as to set them with his own on the shelves. They seemed ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... records appear various well-known names that one does not naturally associate with the Forest. The Conqueror granted it to his half-brother, Robert, Earl of Montaigne; King John gave the Earldom of Cornwall to his second son, Richard Plantagenet, afterwards King of the Romans. This Prince 'much augmented the powers of the stannaries of Devon and Cornwall, and under his auspices they thrived exceedingly.' For a short time the earldom ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... which I had just purchased at a vast expense, should be put up in my Egyptian salon. By the awkwardness of the unpacker, the statue's thumb was broken. This broken thumb saved my life; it converted ennui into anger. Like Montaigne and his sausage, I had now something to complain of, and I was happy. But at last my anger subsided, the thumb would serve me no longer as a subject of conversation, and I relapsed into silence and black melancholy. I was "a'weary of the sun;" my old thoughts recurred. At this ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... nightly resurrection. Towards two in the 25 morning, they declare the thing takes place; and neither know nor inquire further. And at least it is a pleasant incident. We are disturbed in our slumber only, like the luxurious Montaigne, "that we may the better and more sensibly relish it." We have a moment to look upon the 30 stars, and there is a special pleasure for some minds in the reflection that we share the impulse with all outdoor creatures in our neighborhood, that we have escaped out of the Bastille of civilization, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... hair. He went to his own room, and to bed, where he tried to read, as his custom was; but he never knew what he was reading until afterwards he remembered the appearance of the letters of the book (it was in Montaigne's Essays), and the events of the day passed before him—that is, of the last hour of the day; for as for the morning, and the poor milkmaid yonder, he never so much as once thought. And he could not ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... be Captain. I have been, up to this time, better than for the last two winters: but feel a Worm in my head now and then, for all that. You will say, only a Maggot. Well; we shall see. When I go to Lowestoft, I take Montaigne with me; very comfortable Company. One of his Consolations for The Stone is, that it makes one less unwilling to part with Life. Oh, you think that it didn't need much Wisdom to suggest that? Please yourself, Ma'am. January, just gone! February, only twenty-eight Days: then March ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; his accusations of himself are always believed, his praises never.—MONTAIGNE. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... appearing rarely on the stage thereafter. In 1740 he published An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian ... with an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time. "There are few," wrote Goldsmith, "who do not prefer a page of Montaigne or Colley Cibber, who candidly tell us what they thought of the world, and the world thought of them, to the more stately memoirs and transactions of Europe." But beside the personal interest, this book contains criticisms on acting of enduring value, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... lawyers, nothing technical, but always some piece of common sense, alike interesting to laymen as to clerks. Lord Mansfield's merit is the merit of common sense. It is the same quality we admire in Aristotle, Montaigne, Cervantes, or in Samuel Johnson, or Franklin. Its application to law seems quite accidental. Each of Mansfield's famous decisions contains a level sentence or two, which hit the mark. His sentences ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... characteristic of the book, and something quite different appears. It is that same peculiarity which appears in places and persons and things so different as Spenser, as the poetry of the Pleiade, as Montaigne, as Raleigh, as Donne, as the group of singers known as the Caroline poets. It is a peculiarity which has shown itself in different forms at different times, but never in such vigour and precision as at this time. It combines a profound and certainly ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... game of chess life is! Here's a simple play made complicated. How serenely I moved toward the coveted checkmate, to find a castle towering in the way! I came in here to await young Montaigne. He fails to appear. Chance brings others here, and lo! it becomes a new game. And D'Herouville will be out of hospital to-morrow or next day. Quebec promises to become as lively as Paris. Diane, he called her. What is her object in concealing her name? By all ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... I have come, if possible, to explain myself. To understand is always to forgive. That is a great saying of Montaigne's. If I ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... ask not to what doctors I apply— Sworn to no master, of no sect am I. As drives the storm, at any door I knock; And house with Montaigne now, and ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... corner also, with dreams yet more vain and daring, Castruccio Cesarini cast his eyes upon the queen-like brow of the great heiress. Oh, yes, she had a soul—she could disdain rank and revere genius! What a triumph over De Montaigne—Maltravers—all the world, if he, the neglected poet, could win the hand for which the magnates of the earth sighed in vain! Pure and lofty as he thought himself, it was her birth and her wealth which Cesarini adored in Florence. And Lumley, nearer perhaps to the prize than either—yet still ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Harvard University, for the translation of Marcus Aurelius, and for the translation and selections from the Greek tragic writers. I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. DANIEL W. WILDER, of Kansas, for the quotations from Pilpay, with contributions from Diogenes Laertius, Montaigne, Burton, and Pope's Homer; to Dr. WILLIAM J. ROLFE for quotations from Robert Browning; to Mr. JAMES W. MCINTYRE for quotations from Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Robert Browning, and Tennyson. And I have incurred other obligations to friends ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... divided into almost equal troops. The age of Philip II. was also the age of William of Orange and his four brethren, of Sainte Aldegonde, of Olden-Barneveldt, of Duplessis-Mornay, La Noue, Coligny, of Luther, Melancthon, and Calvin, Walsingham, Sidney, Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth, of Michael Montaigne, and William Shakspeare. It was not an age of blindness, but of glorious light. If the man whom the Maker of the Universe had permitted to be born to such boundless functions, chose to put out his own eyes that he might grope along his great pathway of duty in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... wrecks and forlorn properties of those who have adventured on this dangerous attempt. But a criticism of Stevenson is happy in this, that from the writer it can pass with perfect trust and perfect fluency to the man. He shares with Goldsmith and Montaigne, his own favourite, the happy privilege of making lovers among his readers. 'To be the most beloved of English writers—what a title that is for a man!' says Thackeray of Goldsmith. In such matters, a dispute for pre- eminence in ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... of Hazlitt's personality may be plainly recognized, and these reveal a triple ancestry. He claims descent from Montaigne by virtue of his original observation of humanity with its entire accumulation of custom and prejudice; he is akin to Rousseau in a high-strung susceptibility to emotions, sentiments, and ideas; and he is tinged with a cynicism to which there is no closer ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... kings, who love to be in debt, are all for present money, no matter how they pay it afterwards; besides, the nature of a preface is rambling, never wholly out of the way, nor in it. This I have learned from the practice of honest Montaigne, and return at my pleasure to Ovid and Chaucer, of whom I have little more to say. Both of them built on the inventions of other men; yet since Chaucer had something of his own, as the Wife of Bath's Tale, The Cock and the Fox, which I have translated, and some others, I ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Montaigne in one of his essays* mentions the high excellence Italian cookery had attained in his day. "I have entered into this Discourse upon the Occasion of an Italian I lately receiv'd into my Service, and who was Clerk ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... list of authors to whom Dr. Ferriar holds Sterne to have been more or less indebted: Rabelais, Beroalde de Verville, Bouchet, Bruscambille, Scarron, Swift, an author of the name or pseudonym of "Gabriel John," Burton, Bacon, Blount, Montaigne, Bishop Hall. The catalogue is a reasonably long one; but it is not, of course, to be supposed that Sterne helped himself equally freely from every author named in it. His obligations to some of them are, as Dr. Ferriar admits, but slight. From Rabelais, besides his vagaries of ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... biography, as we are not tied down to an exact concatenation equally with other historians, so a chapter or two (for instance, this I am now writing) may be often passed over without any injury to the whole. And in these inscriptions I have been as faithful as possible, not imitating the celebrated Montaigne, who promises you one thing and gives you another; nor some title-page authors, who promise a great deal and ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... Montaigne the other day," said Ernest, just as they were retiring for the night, "and his letter decides my movements. If you will accept me, then, as a travelling companion, I will go with you to Paris. Have you made up your mind ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... characteristics of Elia, one essentially an essayist, and of the true family of Montaigne, "never judging," as he says, "system-wise of things, but fastening on particulars;" saying all things as it were on chance occasion only, and by way of pastime, yet succeeding thus, "glimpse-wise," in catching ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... was by nature the "good boy," tractable and docile; Feli, the unmanageable, the lawless, the violent. While Jean was dutifully learning his lessons to order, Feli, the obstreperous, imprisoned in the library, was feeding his tender mind with Diderot, Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, and similar diet, and at twelve exhibited such infidel tendencies as made it prudent to defer his first Communion for some ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Corneille and La Fontaine were her favorite traveling companions. "I am well satisfied to be a substance that thinks and reads," she says, finding her good uncle a trifle dull for a compagnon de voyage. Her tastes were catholic. She read Astree with delight, loved Petrarch, Ariosto, and Montaigne; Rabelais made her "die of laughter," she found Plutarch admirable, enjoyed Tacitus as keenly as did Mme. Roland a century later, read Josephus and Lucian, dipped into the history of the crusades and of the iconoclasts, of the holy fathers and of the saints. She preferred the history ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... "The world," says Montaigne, "is incapable of curing itself. It is so impatient of what burthens it, that it thinks only of how it shall rid itself of it, without inquiring at what price. A thousand examples show us that it cures itself ordinarily at its own cost. The getting ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... In these famous Essays, so luminous with the gems of genius, we read not such worldly-wise exhortations as Lord Chesterfield impressed upon his son, not the gossiping frivolities of Horace Walpole, not the cynical wit of Montaigne, but those great certitudes which console in affliction, which kindle hope, which inspire lofty resolutions,—anchors of the soul, pillars of faith, sources of immeasurable joy, the glorious ideals of true objects of desire, the eternal unities of truth and love and beauty; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... is wrong. Plenty of things may be wrong, but it is what is right that really counts. If the critic's work is to be worth while, it is the great element in the thing that he has to seek and to find—to learn what it is that makes it live and gives it its appeal, so that, as Montaigne said about Plutarch, men 'cannot do without' it; why it is that in a world, where everything that can be 'scrapped' is 'scrapped,' is thrown aside and forgotten, this thing, this book or picture, refuses to be ignored, but captures and charms men generations ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... tells us, "Curse leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent." The story of the Egyptian king in Herodotus is too well known to need to be inserted; I refer the more curious reader to the excellent Montaigne, who hath written an essay ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... doves, and many of that queer bird the natives call Sakonboota, whose tail grows so long in the breeding season that his little wings can hardly lift it above the ground, and he flutters about in the breeze like a badly made kite. Riding back at sunset over the flat I felt like Montaigne when he desired to wear away his life in the saddle. The difference is that in the end I may have to eat my own horse. The shells from four guns kept singing their evening hymn above my head as I ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... that he might rest himself. Gaudry could hear her laughing and joking with her lover. She reproached him playfully with hindering her in her dressing. To keep him quiet, she gave him a book to read, Montaigne's "Essays." Georges opened it and read the thirty-fifth chapter of the second book, the essay on "Three Good Women," which tells how three brave women of antiquity endured death or suffering in order to share their husbands' ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... apply to every kind of literary art? What would become of Montaigne if you blew away his allusions, and drove him out of "the allusive way," where he gathers and binds so many flowers from all the gardens and all the rose-hung lanes of literature? Montaigne sets forth to write an Essay on Coaches. He begins with a few remarks on seasickness ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... the subject was in a hypnotic trance; but it is well known that persons may easily train themselves to hold out the arms for any length of time without increasing the respiration by one breath or raising the pulse rate at all. We all remember Montaigne's famous illustration in which he said that if a woman began by carrying a calf about every day she would still be able to carry it ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... Racine next to Dante, Stendhal near Edgar Allan Poe, Montaigne between Goethe and Virgil. And suddenly, with that extraordinary faculty which enabled him, in any collection of objects, to perceive details which he did not at once take in, he noticed that one of the volumes of an English edition of Shakespeare's works did not look exactly like ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... have a good, stout, manly supper,—no Apician kickshaws, the triumphs of palate-science,—no nightingales' tongues, no peacocks' brains, no French follies,—but just a rasher or so, in its naked and elegant simplicity. Montaigne's cook, who treated of his art with a settled countenance and magisterial gravity, would have turned his nose skyward at our humble repast; and he would have cast like scorn upon that to which Milton with such charming grace invited ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... seen more of Cicero's poetry than we have, thought highly of it. So he did himself; but so it was his nature to think of most of his own performances; and such an estimate is common to other authors besides Cicero, though few announce it so openly. Montaigne takes him to task for this, with more wit, perhaps, than fairness. "It is no great fault to write poor verses; but it is a fault not to be able to see how unworthy such poor verses were of his reputation". Voltaire, on the other hand, who was perhaps as good a judge, thought there was "nothing ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... singing-robe view of literature, who appreciate the distinction which literary cultivation gives them over the herd of mankind, but who by no means take that distinction too seriously. Aristophanes, Horace, Lucian, Rabelais, Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, these are all Peacock's literary ancestors, each, of course, with his own difference in especial and in addition. Aristophanes was more of a politician and a patriot, Lucian more of a freethinker, Horace more of a simple pococurante. Rabelais may ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... journeys in imitation of the old Court of France. During these excursions he sometimes partook of the pleasures of the chase, but merely for the sake of reviving an old custom, for in that exercise he found as little amusement as Montaigne did in ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Lady Maclaughlan had long perceived, and was the principal reason of her selecting so weak a woman as her companion; though, at the same time, in justice to her Ladyship's heart as well as head, she had that partiality for her friend for which no other reason can be assigned than that given by Montaigne: "Je l'amais parceque ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... settlements was a little dog belonging to my guide. Brusa was his name, and the management of our loose horses was his legitimate occupation. A bright, lively, officious little fellow was Brusa, very much like a wolf in appearance, and not unlike a human being in certain traits of his character. Montaigne says that great fault was found with him, when he was mayor of his native town, because he was always satisfied to let things go along smoothly; and though the citizens admitted that they had never been so ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... seeming to be the result of conceit, which would surely have repelled the reader, it rather attracts and enhances his kindly feeling for its author. The paragraph would remind one in certain ways of that personal element that was to become more popular in literature after Montaigne in the next century made it ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... all appearance, is the account of the observations made by M. Montaigne, as presented to the Academy of Sciences at Paris by M. Baudouin in 1761. The transit of Venus which was to take place on June 6 in that year led to some inquiry as to the satellite supposed to have been seen by Cassini and Short, for of course a transit would be a favourable ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... manner from city to city, writing Latin verses for his hosts and Italian sonnets in their ladies' albums, buying books and music, and creating, one cannot doubt, an all too flattering impression of an English Protestant. To travel in Italy with Montaigne or Milton, or Evelyn or Gray, or Shelley, or, pathetic as it is, with the dying Sir Walter, is perhaps more instructive than to go there for yourself with a tourist's ticket. Old Montaigne, who was but forty-seven when he made his journey, and whom therefore I would not call ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the patronage of the earl of Southampton, to whom the sonnet is addressed, and that he can identify the four personifications! Shakespeare of course is the Dumb taught to sing by the favor of the earl; resolute John Florio, the translator of Montaigne, is Heavy Ignorance; Tom Nash is the Learned, who has had feathers added to his wing; and Marlowe is the Grace to whom is given a double majesty! Marlowe's chief characteristic was majesty, says Mr. Massey; therefore, we suppose, he is spoken of as grace. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... have felt the disadvantage of writing after Montaigne; and it is impossible to tell how much originality in others Dr. Holmes has destroyed in this country. In whist there are some men you always prefer to have on your left hand, and I take it that this intuitive essayist, who is so alert to seize the few remaining unappropriated ideas and analogies ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... is Parham noted: a heronry in the park, and in the house a copy of Montaigne with Shakespeare's autograph in it. The house, a spreading Tudor mansion, is the seat of Lord Zouche, a descendant of the traveller, Robert Curzon, who wrote The Monasteries of the Levant, that long, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Henry IV. of France; and of Ben Jonson's discreditable drunken exploits in the French capital when he went thither as tutor to Sir Walter Ralegh's son. To these episodes might well be added the pleasant personal intercourse of Francis Bacon's brother, Anthony, with the great French essayist Montaigne, when the Englishman was sojourning at Bordeaux in 1583. Montaigne's Essays achieved hardly less fame in Elizabethan England than in France. Both Shakespeare and Bacon gave proof of indebtedness ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... capable of producing a trustworthy guide book. The value of Oceana and The Bow of Ulysses is altogether different. They are the characteristic reflections of an intensely vivid, highly cultivated mind, bringing out of its treasure-house things new and old. "The King knows your book," it was said to Montaigne, "and would like to know you." "If the King knows my book," replied the philosopher, "he knows me." Froude is in his books, especially in his books of travel, for in them, more than anywhere else, he thinks aloud. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Montaigne, in his curious Essay, entitled "Des Destriers," says that all the world knows everything about Bucephalus. The name of the favourite charger of the Cid Ruy Diaz, is scarcely less celebrated. Notice ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... by trying to imagine the impressions which our modern life would make upon some sensitive mind of a remote age. I have fancied myself rambling about New York with Montaigne, and taking note of his shrewd, satirical comment. I can hardly imagine him expressing any feeling of surprise, much less any sentiment of admiration; but I am confident that under a masque of ironical self-complacency the ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... but Mr. Langbain observes, that the truest picture of Mr. Cotton's mind is to be seen in a little piece published at the end of these poems called Retirement; but the chief of Mr. Cotton's production, seems to be his translation of Montaigne's Essays, dedicated to George Lord Saville, Marquis of Hallifax; his lordship in a letter to him, thus express his esteem for the translator, and admiration of his performance. This letter is printed amongst the other pieces of the marquis's ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... half humorously, as a fellow whose forte lay in transcribing what was before him, to be seen and felt, tasted and heard. This extremely modern denotement was a marked feature of his genius, often overlooked. He had a desire to know all manner of men; he had the noble curiosity of Montaigne; this it was, along with his human sympathy, that led him to rough it in emigrant voyages and railroad trips across the plains. It was this characteristic, unless I err, the lack of which in "Prince Otto" gives it a certain rococo air: ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... of their legitimate owners! How are we to account for the presence of book-plates—quite a pretty collection at times—on the shelves of men who possess no such toys of their own? When I was a girl I had access to a small and well-chosen library (not greatly exceeding Montaigne's fourscore volumes), each book enriched with an appropriate device of scaly dragon guarding the apples of Hesperides. Beneath the dragon was the motto (Johnsonian in form if not in substance), "Honour and Obligation ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... thanked the great author. The ice was broken. They discussed Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Schaupenhauer, etc. Victorien Sardou heard the clock strike; he had lunched hastily and had to be back at the Conservatoire by two o'clock, as the jury still had to hear eleven pupils. He began laughing and talking very fast, in his habitual manner: "I must tell you, however, why I have come; ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... pen of Montaigne; but it still had neither nobility nor harmony. Ronsard spoiled the language by bringing into French poetry the Greek compounds which the doctors and philosophers used. Malherbe repaired Ronsard's mischief somewhat. The language became more noble and more harmonious with the establishment ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... whatever to do with the matter.[3] It may also be noticed that the story related of the king who, to revenge himself on God, forbade His name to be mentioned, or His worship to be celebrated throughout his dominions, is said by Montaigne, in one of his essays, to have been current in his part of France, when he was a boy. The king was Alfonso xi of Castile. No. 68 of A C. Mery Talys, "Of the Friar that stole the Pudding," is merely an abridgment of the same story, which occurs in Tarltons ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... would stop and attribute too much to genius, he shows us that "what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no one man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse." If we would find in his essay on Montaigne, a biography, we are shown a biography of scepticism—and in reducing this to relation between "sensation and the morals" we are shown a true Montaigne—we know the man better perhaps by this less presentation. If we would stop and trust ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... dissection, Toepffer comprehended the whole of the individual. Hence his universality. In manner of thought, and in style, his writings have traits which remind one of Sterne, Addison, Charles Lamb, Montaigne, Xavier de Maistre, (the author of the famous "Voyage autour de ma Chambre,") and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... a favorite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... day, only creeping out for dinner. Lying in my bunk I can, without moving, reach my books, pipes, or anything else I may want, which is one advantage of a small apartment. My old wound began to ache a little to-day, probably from the cold. Read "Montaigne's Essays" and nursed myself. Harton came in in the afternoon with Doddy, the Captain's child, and the skipper himself followed, so that I ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not only in the life and richness which it gave to the imagination of the time, but in the immense interest which from this moment attached itself to Man. Shakspere's conception of Caliban, like the questioning of Montaigne, marks the beginning of a new and a truer, because a more inductive, philosophy of human nature and human history. The fascination exercised by the study of human character showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet more in the ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... thus pass in review every business and every profession, and should always find that the producers, in their character of producers, have invariably anti-social interests. "The shop-keeper (says Montaigne) succeeds in his business through the extravagance of youth; the laborer by the high price of grain; the architect by the decay of houses; officers of justice by lawsuits and quarrels. The standing and occupation even of ministers of religion are drawn from our death and our vices. No physician ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... question we either frame appropriate means for frustrating his evil tendencies or, if we see some promise in him, work for his freedom and bid him take advantage of it to make himself and others happy. So far as I know, Charron, a friend of Montaigne, was one of the first to say a good word for man's animal nature, and a hundred years later the amiable Shaftesbury pointed out some honestly gentlemanly traits in the species. To the modern student of biology and anthropology man is neither good ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... she found excellent books, Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare," and better still Montaigne. After the first year or so of elementary work she met her pupil on equal terms, and they read and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... away for mere ennui. With Dandolo, refusing a crown at ninety-six, winning battles at ninety-four; with Wellington, planning and superintending fortifications at eighty; with Bacon and Humboldt, students to the last gasp; with wise old Montaigne, shrewd in his grey-beard wisdom and loving life, even in the midst of his fits of gout and colic—Age knows far too much to act like a sulky child. It knows too well the results and the value of things to care about them; that the ache will subside, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... historian would hesitate to answer this question directly in the affirmative. History relates a long series of events, and depicts a vast number of characters; and let us recollect, gentlemen, the difficulty of thoroughly understanding a single character or a solitary event. Montaigne, after having passed his life in self-study, was continually making new discoveries on his own nature; he has filled a long work with them, and ends by saying, "Man is a subject so diversified, so uncertain and vain, that it is difficult ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... this time she happened upon "Elizabeth and her German Garden," and was very greatly delighted and stimulated by that little sister of Montaigne. She was charmed by the book's fresh gaiety, by its gallant resolve to set off all the good things there are in this world, the sunshine and flowers and laughter, against the limitations and thwartings and disappointments of life. For a ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... optical instrument, a sounding-board, a musical box, anything rather than a living tongue. To a later race of stylists, who have gone as far as Samoa and beyond in the quest of exotic perfumery, Borrow would have said simply, in the words of old Montaigne, "To smell, though well, is to stink,"—"Malo, quam bene olere, nil olere." Borrow, in fact, by a right instinct went back to the straightforward manner of Swift and Defoe, Smollett and Cobbett, whose vigorous prose he specially admired; and he found his choice ill appreciated by critics ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... the fire with these proofs of vanity! and let us put this card in the handwriting of our office-boy, this direction for cheap dinners, and the receipt of the broker where I bought my last armchair, in their place. These indications of my poverty will serve, as Montaigne says, 'mater ma superbe', and will always make me recollect the modesty in which the dignity ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... have already stated that Florio's house was assessed for the poor-rate in Fulham Street, on the 12th October, 1625, the year of Florio's death; and be it remembered that Florio was the translator of Montaigne's Essays, of which a copy of the original edition, bearing Shakespeare's very rare autograph, was not very long since purchased by the British Museum, at what was considered to be a very large price. When the genuineness ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... van den Vorst Mauritius (River of Prince Maurice). Wassenaer (1624) speaks of the river as "called first Rio de Montagnes, now the River Mauritius." De Laet, in Nieuwe Wereldt (1625), gives "Manhattes River" and "Rio de Montaigne," but says that "the Great River" is the usual designation. In his Latin version of 1633, and French of 1640, he adds a mention of the name Nassau River. As Dr. Johannes la Montagne did not come to New Netherland till 1637, the derivation here given can not hold. ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... be observed, is not intended as a manual of rare or curious, or in any way peculiar books, but as the instruction of a Nestor on the best books for study and use in all departments of literature. Yet one will look in vain there for such names as Montaigne, Shaftesbury, Benjamin Franklin, D'Alembert, Turgot, Adam Smith, Malebranche, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Fenelon, Burke, Kant, Richter, Spinoza, Flechier, and many others. Characteristically enough, if you turn up Rousseau in the index, ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... Renaissance and the Reformation: Marguerite de Valois, Marot, Rabelais, Calvin, Montaigne, Charron, and others.—2. Light Literature: Ronsard, Jodelle, Hardy, Malherbe, Scarron, Madame de Rambouillet, and others.—3. The French Academy.—4. The Drama: Corneille.—5. Philosophy: Descartes, Pascal; ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... there are "professionals" to whom we are willing to listen as oracles, I do not want to see everybody who is not a "professional" silenced or snubbed, if he ventures into any field of knowledge which he has not made especially his own. I like to read Montaigne's remarks about doctors, though he never took a medical degree. I can even enjoy the truth in the sharp satire of Voltaire on the medical profession. I frequently prefer the remarks I hear from the pew after the sermon to those I have just been hearing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... grandiose and monstrous defence of personal force defying the social. But will it not remain also, by the side of Hegel's philosophy, as an eloquent codicil to those testaments of individual sovereignty signed by Aristophanes, Montaigne, and Voltaire? He believed himself a spiritualist, and, sublime sawbones, he studied only in the medical amphitheatre. He entered a drawing-room only through the kitchen and the dressing-room. He was always ignorant of that fine saying ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... of two of Rochefoucauld's Reflexions occur in the third and fourth stanzas of the third canto of Byron's Don Juan. I am not aware that any notice has been taken of them beyond a note appended to the first passage, in Moore's edition of Byron's Works, attributing the mot to Montaigne: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... persuasion, the views that they advocate and the system of thought that underlies them were not the products of time and accident. Milton was an idealist, pure and simple, in politics. Had he lived under the Tudor sovereigns, he would have been reduced, with Sir Thomas More, Montaigne, and John Barclay, the author of Argenis, to express himself by way of romance and allegory. It was his fortune to live at a time when the Tudor state system was breaking up with appalling suddenness, and along with it the Tudor compromise in the affairs of the ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... spoke to my thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, I came to a tomb of August Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument, "lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne." Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after two hundred and fifty ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... In Montaigne's words, 'The tales I borrow, I charge upon the consciences of those from whom I have them.' I have gathered cues from all quarters, but in almost every case my indebtedness stands recorded on the ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... in some points, with Montaigne, and in others with Sir Thomas Browne. He resembles the first in simplicity, bonhommie, and miscellaneous learning, and the other in rambling manner, quaint phraseology, and fantastic imagination. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... magnetism of humanity which has been the agony of mature years, of this I had not a trace when I was a boy. Of those fragile loves to which most men look back with tenderness and passion, emotions to be explained only as Montaigne explained them, parceque c'etait lui, parceque c'etait moi, I knew nothing. I, to whom friendship has since been like sunlight and like sleep, left school unbrightened and unrefreshed by commerce with ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... crooked courses, are the goings of the serpent; which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet. There is no vice, that doth so cover a man with shame, as to be found false and perfidious. And therefore Montaigne saith prettily, when he inquired the reason, why the word of the lie should be such a disgrace, and such an odious charge? Saith he, If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... Mr. Courtenay has preserved of these early compositions is by no means contemptible: indeed, there is one passage on Like and Dislike, which could have been produced only by a mind habituated carefully to reflect on its own operations, and which reminds us of the best things in Montaigne. ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... don't know if all the malentendus were in French, but almost all the explanations were, and this didn't a bit prevent Brooksmith's following them. I know Mr. Offord used to read passages to him from Montaigne and Saint-Simon, for he read perpetually when alone- -when THEY were alone, that is—and Brooksmith was always about. Perhaps you'll say no wonder Mr. Offord's butler regarded him as "rather mad." However, if I'm not sure what he thought about Montaigne ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... parts of Europe, persons who entertained the most virulent enmity against Christianity. In this pernicious class were many Aristotelians, such as Pomponatius; many philosophers and wits, such as Bodin, Rabelais, Montaigne; many Italians, as ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... and the construction of sentences and periods. Few of his confessions are better known than those on his apprenticeship in style to the great authors of the past. He gave himself up to the schools of Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe, Hawthorne, Montaigne, Baudelaire, William ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are literature. There is a subtle informality, a delightful easiness, perhaps even a faint immorality essentially literary, about the quill. The quill is rich in suggestion and quotation. There are quills that would quote you Montaigne and Horace in the hands of a trades-union delegate. And those quirky, idle noises this pen makes are delightful, and would break your easy fluency with wit. All the classical essayists wrote with a quill, and Addison used the most expensive kind the Government purchased. And the beginning of ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... this book. His "Erasmus Reading to the Young Charles V." is in the Luxembourg, and the Brussels museum has his "Dante at Ravenna," and the "Entry of Albert and Isabella into Ostend." Besides these he produced "The Mass of Adrien Willaert," "The Childhood of Montaigne," "Shakespeare and his Family," "Vesalius," "Hamlet," and "Murillo in his Studio." One of his paintings, entitled "The Women of Siena, 1553," shows the women of that city working on the fortifications intended to resist the besieging army of Charles ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... third edition of Reliquiae Wottonianae, Walton alludes to his friendship with a much younger and gayer man than himself, Charles Cotton (born 1630), the friend of Colonel Richard Lovelace, and of Sir John Suckling: the translator of Scarron's travesty of Virgil, and of Montaigne's Essays. Cotton was a roisterer, a man at one time deep in debt, but he was a Royalist, a scholar, and an angler. The friendship between him and Walton is creditable to the freshness of the old man and to the kindness of the younger, who, to be sure, laughed at Izaak's heavily dubbed ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... also, one of the first to have a circle—well organized according to modern etiquette—where the highest aristocracy, men of letters, magistrates, artists, and men of genius met on equal terms and in familiar and social intercourse; Montaigne, Brantome, and other great writers dedicated their works to her. She also directed a select few, an academy, to instruct and distract herself. It is said that every coquette, every bourgeois woman, and almost every court lady endeavored ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... some sensible lines, but although Roscoe has managed to extract two quotable passages, it is needless to imitate him here. These productions show no trace of the authentic Fielding. The essays are more remarkable, although, like Montaigne's, they are scarcely described by their titles. That on Conversation is really a little treatise on good breeding; that on the Characters of Men, a lay sermon against Fielding's pet antipathy—hypocrisy. Nothing ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... James, Came early, out of pure goodwill, To see the girl in deshabille. Their clamour 'lighting from their chairs, Grew louder, all the way up stairs; At entrance loudest, where they found The room with volumes littered round, Vanessa held Montaigne, and read, Whilst Mrs. Susan combed her head: They called for tea and chocolate, And fell into their usual chat, Discoursing with important face, On ribbons, fans, and gloves, and lace: Showed patterns just from India brought, And gravely asked her what she thought, Whether the red or green were ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... there is steam and heat, things of great pleasure and refreshment." It was a custom also of the ancient Greeks and Romans to sprinkle their guests with fragrant waters. The Gascons had once the same taste: "At times," says Montaigne, "from the bottom of the stage, they caused sweet-scented waters to spout upwards and dart their thread to such a prodigious height, as to sprinkle and perfume the vast multitudes of spectators." The Native gentry of India always slightly sprinkle their visitors with rose-water. ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... as Montaigne's Essays, Rousseau's Confessions, Mrs. Carlyle's Letters, Mrs. Oliphant's Memoirs, the Autobiography of B. R. Haydon, to name but a few books that come into my mind, are the sort of books that I crave for, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a more ignorant sort of creatures than either of the former maintain, that the character of Dorax is not only unnatural, but inconsistent with itself: let them read the play, and think again; and if yet they are not satisfied, cast their eyes on that chapter of the wise Montaigne, which is intitled, De l'Inconstance des Actions humaines. A longer reply is what those cavillers deserve not; but I will give them and their fellows to understand, that the earl of Dorset was pleased to read the tragedy twice over before ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... singular fineness of his perceptions, and the pious tendency of his thoughts, and enjoyed with him his proud reception, not as from above, but almost on equal ground, of Homer and AEschylus, of Dante and Petrarch, of Montaigne, of Calderon, of Goethe. Margaret wished, also, to defend his privacy from the dangerous ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Lamb will be remembered, in years to come, with Rabelais and Montaigne, with Sir Thomas Browne, with Steele, and with Addison. He unites many of the finest characteristics of these several writers. He has wisdom and wit of the highest order, exquisite humor, a genuine and cordial vein ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... Eusebius, when you publish it in Maga, as you did my last, folk will say—"Why, what is all this about? Horae Catullianae! It is no such thing." Be it, then, I say, what you will. Do you think I am writing an essay?—no, a letter; and I may, if I please, entitle it, as Montaigne did—"On coach horses," and still make it what I please. It shall be a novel, if they please, for that is what they look for now: so let the Curate be the hero,—and the heroine—but must it be a love story? Then I won't forestall the interest, so wait to the end; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... a sense of warmth and comfort at my heart. I am a lonely man; the people I take to seem to have a way of passing on in the stream of life—or death—leaving me with a few well-thumbed volumes on a shelf in my rooms for consolation. Walt Whitman, Montaigne, The Bard, two or three other lesser poets, and you've the friends that have stayed by me for thirty years. And so, having met up with Worth Gilbert when he was a youngster, at the time his mother was living in San Francisco to get a residence ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... papers; that write out of what they presently find or meet, without choice. By which means it happens that what they have discredited and impugned in one week, they have before or after extolled the same in another. Such are all the essayists, even their master Montaigne. These, in all they write, confess still what books they have read last, and therein their own folly so much, that they bring it to the stake raw and undigested; not that the place did need it neither, but that they thought themselves furnished ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... in particular for the addition of "manly power" to a "grace" of mind, obviously there already in due sufficiency. Would he presently carry a letter with recommendation of himself to Monsieur Michel de Montaigne? Linked they were, in the common friendship of the late Etienne de la Boetie yonder! Monsieur Michel could tell him much of the great ones—of the Greek and Latin masters of style. Let his study be in them! With what justice, by the way, had those Latin poets dealt with ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... sentimental song is sung the audience pay little attention. To patriotic songs they listen respectfully. A song which breathes the glories of literature as represented by Montaigne, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Moliere is tolerated idly. But when the stage is presently cleared for a ballet the young blousards—for they are mostly young men who gather here—are all attention. What is their disgust at perceiving that the dancers are men in ancient Greek ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... house is from later, from the time of Henri Quatre. Poissac is not far from Tours. An ugly name, isn't it? But to me it is very beautiful. The house has orchards all round it, and yellow roses with flushed centers poke themselves in my window, and there is a little tower like Montaigne's." ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... in abdicating the functions of reason and conscience, shifting the onus of responsibility on to others, and agreeing to believe, as it were, by proxy. She had plunged fearlessly and headlong into Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Condillac, Mably, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, Montesquieu; beginning to call many things in question, and, through the darkness and confusion into which she was sometimes thrown, trying honestly and sincerely to feel her way to some more glorious ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... pleasure of effort and misses one of the essential lessons of life.—that pleasure and satisfaction must come from the chase and not from the quarry, from the struggle and effort as well as from the goal. Montaigne, that wise skeptic, lays much homely emphasis on this, as indeed all wise men do. But too great a struggle, too desperate an effort, exhausts, and as a runner lies panting and motionless at the tape, so we all have seen men reach a desired ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... age of Plato, rich with gathering experience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have sucked color and ripeness from the genial autumns of all the select intelligences that have steeped them in the sunshine of their love and appreciation;—these quaint freaks of russet tell of Montaigne; these stripes of crimson fire, of Shakespeare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne; this purpling bloom, of Lamb;—in such fruits we taste the legendary gardens of Alcinoues and the orchards of Atlas; and there are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... (Auerbach), Eugenie Grandet (Balzac), Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), Emerson's Essays, Boswell's Life of Johnson, History of the English People (Green), Outlines of Universal History, Origin of Species, Montaigne's Essays, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Whittier, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... designation of the following anecdote confirms its authenticity, which however required no other indication than the characteristic humour of Addison in his odd conception of old Montaigne. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... feeling of soreness may, be present for several days. The stone may again cause pain in passing through the urethra, or it may remain in the bladder as a nucleus for a bladder calculus (stone). Dr. Osler gives Montaigne's description as follows; "Thou art seen to sweat with pain, to look pale and red, to tremble, to vomit well nigh to blood, to suffer strange contortions and convulsions, by starts to let tears drop from thine eyes, to urine thick, black and frightful water, or to have it suppressed by some ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... mixture of indignation and contempt; 'you talk like a man whom posterity will never mention. Look at the names you have insulted! Look at this letter from Montaigne to Boetius, so illegible that it has never been printed; look at that billet of Henry IV. to the Duchesse de Verneuil; and that Sonnet of Malherbe, written entirely by Bacon's own hand; that letter from Madame de Maintenon to Father Le Tellier; that ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... responsible for translating one kind into action while holding the other kind in check. The earthward and the heavenward are in each of us, striving for mastery; but no imagination is vainer than that we can indulge both, or practise the impartiality with which Montaigne's singular devotee lighted one candle {152} to St. George and another to the dragon. If we would realise the type of perfect in the mind, we must not gratify "the penchant for revolt," but ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... her sex) many rusty bouquins, now worth far more than their weight in gold. Moliere owned no fewer than two hundred and forty volumes of French and Italian comedies. From these he took what suited him wherever he found it. He had plenty of classics, histories, philosophic treatises, the essays of Montaigne, a ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... Montaigne says, "Books are a languid pleasure"; but I find certain books vital and spermatic, not leaving the reader what he was; he shuts the book a richer man. I would never willingly read any others than such. And I will venture, at the risk ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Scarsdale his bottle, Darty his ham-pie; Ridotta sips and dances, till she see The doubling lustres dance as fast as she; F—— loves the senate, Hockley-hole his brother, Like in all else, as one egg to another. I love to pour out all myself, as plain As downright Shippen, or as old Montaigne: In them, as certain to be loved as seen, The soul stood forth, nor kept a thought within; In me what spots (for spots I have) appear, Will prove at least the medium must be clear. In this impartial glass, my muse intends Fair to expose myself, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... Montaigne says: "We must see and get acquainted with our sins if we expect to correct them." Virtue presupposes trials just as much as victory implies warfare. The triumph of virtue is to defeat morbid or excessive passion, for virtue is only realized when it is a conquering ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... and seriously weighed the methods by which the famous Montaigne was educated, and resolving in some degree to exceed them, resolved he should speak and learn nothing but the learned languages, and especially the Greek; in which he constantly eat and drank, according to Homer. But what most conduced to his easy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... lighting up her marble face, her scarlet lip quivering, and her shining golden hair. He went to his own room, and to bed, where he tried to read, as his custom was; but he never knew what he was reading until afterwards he remembered the appearance of the letters of the book (it was in Montaigne's Essays), and the events of the day passed before him—that is, of the last hour of the day; for as for the morning, and the poor milkmaid yonder, he never so much as once thought. And he could not get to sleep until daylight, and woke with a violent ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of AEsop,"—thus says Montaigne in his charming essay "Of Books"(7)—"have several senses and meanings, of which the Mythologists choose some one that tallies with the fable. But for the most part 't is only what presents itself at the first view, and is superficial; there being others more lively, essential, and internal, into ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... such disgust of life as a month—alone with books—in a library? Dissatisfaction and satiety, melancholy and fatigue show as plainly in the pages of a Kempis as they do in Schopenhauer, as they do in Lucretius, as they do in St. Bernard, as they do in Montaigne, in Marcus Aurelius, in Dante, in St. Teresa. They are, indeed, the ever-recurrent cries in human feeling, the ever-recurrent phases in human thought. Uninterrupted contentment was never yet found ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... we may say, as Montaigne said of himself, that he was a Platonist before he knew who Plato was. Yet he was the first Hellenistic Jew who perceived the fundamental harmony between the philosopher's idealism and Jewish monotheism, and he was ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... negro, was born in Jamaica. The Duke of Montaigne, governor of the island, thinking him an unusually bright boy, sent him to England to school. He afterward entered the University of Cambridge, and became quite a proficient in mathematics. During his stay ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... said aloud. "'It is a nation,' would I answer Plato, 'that has no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters——'" And with that he sat about reshaping Montaigne's conceptions of Utopia into verse. He wrote—while his left hand held the book flat—as orderly as any county-clerk might do in the recordance of a ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... after he left Philadelphia, that he had not seen a newspaper since his flight from the cares of government, and he declared that he thought of never taking one again. "I think it is Montaigne," he wrote to Edmund Randolph on the third of February, "who has said that ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head. I am sure it is true, as to anything political, and shall endeavor to estrange myself to everything of that character." But his hatred of Hamilton, and ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... not only because Coquenil's anger was stirred by this cynical avowal, but because just then there shot around the corner from the Avenue Montaigne a large red automobile which crossed the Champs Elysees slowly, past the fountain and the tulip beds, and, turning into the Avenue Gabrielle, stopped under the chestnut trees, its engines throbbing. Like a flash it came ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... all about WHY I have thus fallen from my company would be a tedious thing, and all about one's self too—whom, Montaigne says, one never talks about without detriment to the person talked about. Suffice to say, 'so it is'; and one's friends, however kind and 'loyal' (as the phrase goes), do manage to exist and enjoy ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... bottle, Darty his ham-pie; Ridotta sips and dances, till she see The doubling lustres dance as fast as she; F—— loves the Senate, Hockley-hole his brother, Like in all else, as one egg to another. 50 I love to pour out all myself, as plain As downright Shippen,[124] or as old Montaigne: In them, as certain to be loved as seen, The soul stood forth, nor kept a thought within; In me what spots (for spots I have) appear, Will prove at least the medium must be clear. In this impartial glass, my Muse intends Fair to expose myself, my foes, my friends; Publish ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... artless language of the peasants of the district that I sing—as they used to say—really has to be translated. Those people speak too much French for us, and the development of the language since Rabelais and Montaigne has deprived us of much of the old wealth. It is so with all progress, and we must make up our minds to it. But it is pleasant still to hear those picturesque idioms in general use on the old soil of the centre of France; especially as they are the genuine expressions of the mockingly tranquil ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... and therefore it is sought in abstracts and epitomes, which afford meagre food to the intellect, though they take away the uneasy sense of inanition. Tout abrege sur un bon livre est un sot abrege, says Montaigne; and of all abridgments there are none by which a reader is liable, and so likely, to be deceived as by ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... on right Yankee shoulders, whose range Has Olympus for one pole, for t'other the Exchange; He seems, to my thinking (although I'm afraid The comparison must, long ere this, have been made). A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian's gold mist And the Gascon's shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist. A Fable for Critics. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... to throw Clinton off his guard. For instance, to one of his generals he wrote in detail just how he had planned to lay siege to New York. He selected a young minister, by the name of Montaigne, to carry the dispatch to Morristown, through what was ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... persons, and of grave judgments too, who verily believe that the quantity of conscience amongst mankind is not worth speaking of, and treat of human actions as entirely independent of it. And this fault honest Montaigne finds with Guicciardini:—"I have also," says he, "observed this in him, that of so many persons and so many effects, so many motives and so many counsels as he judges of, he never attributes any one of them to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... publication is intended to supply a recognised deficiency in our literature—a library edition of the Essays of Montaigne. This great French writer deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in the land of his birth, but in all countries and in all literatures. His Essays, which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of his productions, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Montaigne, "youth is capable of any inscription." Let us have only those inscriptions which will do us honor in the long years that the parchment will unroll before us. "Unless a tree has borne its blossoms in the spring," writes Bishop Hare, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... other measure serve to raise them as a class, and this, not by pulling down others, but by levelling them up to a higher and still advancing standard of religion, intelligence, and virtue. "All moral philosophy," says Montaigne, "is as applicable to a common and private life as to the most splendid. Every man carries the entire form of the ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his head which is all the more interesting for a little twist in the brains. He sometimes reminds the reader of Montaigne, but from no other than the general circumstances of an egotism common to both; which in Montaigne is too often a mere amusing gossip, a chit-chat story of whims and peculiarities that lead to nothing,—but which in Sir Thomas ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... egotist is he that fears to say "I" and "me." "It will probably rain"—that is dogmatic. "I think it will rain"—that is natural and modest. Montaigne is the most delightful of essayists because so great is his humility that he does not think it important that we see not Montaigne. He so forgets himself that he employs no artifice ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... predecessors had tried to nationalize on Parnassus. It was a Bohemian, Mathurin Regnier, who was one of the last defenders of the bulwarks of poetry, assailed by the phalanx of rhetoricians and grammarians who declared Rabelais barbarous and Montaigne obscure. It was this same cynic, Mathurin Regnier, who, adding fresh knots to the satiric whip of Horace, exclaimed, in indignation at the manners of his day, "Honor is an ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... Moreover Bordeaux was more exposed to the enlightening influence of the sun of philosophy than the centre of France. Philosophy had germed there ere it arose in Paris, for Bordeaux was the birthplace of Montaigne and Montesquieu, those two great republicans of the French school. The one had deeply investigated the religious dogmata, the other the political institutions; and the president Dupaty had long after awakened ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... imagination; it brought with it the conception of Roman virtue, and this might well unite itself (as we see afterwards in Corneille) with Christian faith. Among the many translators of the sixteenth century was Montaigne's early friend—the friend in memory of all his life—ETIENNE DE LA BOETIE (1530-63). It is not, however, for his fragments of Plutarch or his graceful rendering of Xenophon's Economics (named by him the Mesnagerie) that we remember La Boetie; it is rather for his eloquent pleading on behalf ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... unseen. Hence the perfect intelligence that subsists between wise men of remote ages. A man cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book but time and like-minded men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, "They ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... during his dispute with Voltaire on the point, "I think over all the great authors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French and English (and I know no other languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew." One is astonished to find that he was contemptuous of Montaigne. "What signifies what a man thought," he wrote, "who never thought of anything but himself, and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?" This sentence might have served as a condemnation of Walpole himself, and indeed he meant it so. Walpole, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in scruples, fell back upon a more popular form of wit. 'I see,' he sneered, 'you prevail like the false pig in Aesop.' 'And you fail,' I answered, smiling, 'like the hedgehog in Montaigne.' Need I say that there is no hedgehog in Montaigne? 'Your claptrap comes off,' he said; 'so would your beard.' I had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather witty. But I laughed heartily, ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... understood and their influence properly appreciated. As to the reign of Francis I., however, it must be premised as follows: several of the most illustrious of French writers, in poesy and prose, Ronsard, Montaigne, Bodin, and Stephen Pasquier, were born during that king's lifetime and during the first half of the sixteenth century; but it is to the second half of that century and to the first of the seventeenth that they belong by the glory of their works and of their influence; their place in ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... exercises of a country retirement; whilst on the shelves, there sleeps undisturbed the forgotten literature of the Augustan age of France—all this evidently shows, that there was once, at least, to be found in the interior of the kingdom, another and a different state of things. In the essays of Montaigne, the private life of a French gentleman is admirably depicted. His days appear to have been divided between his family, his library, and his estate. A French nobleman lived then happy in the seat of his ancestors. ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... to start at every Nay, and even at that sharp, decided Yea, and feels something like a bite thereby. Yea! and Nay!—they seem to him opposed to morality; he loves, on the contrary, to make a festival to his virtue by a noble aloofness, while perhaps he says with Montaigne: "What do I know?" Or with Socrates: "I know that I know nothing." Or: "Here I do not trust myself, no door is open to me." Or: "Even if the door were open, why should I enter immediately?" Or: "What is the use of any hasty hypotheses? ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... fine, satisfactory sort of a fellow, but very long-winded"; considered Horace Walpole's "the best wit ever published in the shape of letters"; and dismissed Madame de Sevigne as "very much over-praised." Of Montaigne he says—"He thinks aloud, that is his great merit, but does not think remarkably well. Mankind has improved in thinking ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell |
