"Montaigne" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the irresponsible power of the sovereign, Montagu and Mainwaring, had been presented, the one to the see of Chichester, the other—the impeached and condemned of the Commons—to the rich living Montagu's consecration had vacated. Montaigne, the licenser of Mainwaring's incriminated sermon, was raised to the Archbishopric of York, while Neile and Laud, who were openly named in the Remonstrance as the "troublers of the English Israel," were rewarded respectively with the rich see of Durham and the important and deeply-dyed Puritan ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... 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. There are strange people in the world. One of them criticised Froude in ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... all ages are not wanting who believe that animals have a portion of that same reason which is the pride of man. Montaigne admitted that they had both thought and reason, and Pope believed that even a cat may consider a man made for his service. Humboldt, Helvitius, Darwin and Smellie claimed that animals act as a definite result of actual reasoning. Lord Brougham pertinently ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... in many instances, with originality founded on truth, and with wonderful freshness. The remarks suggested by your own eminent career give to the general conduct of the theme additional interest, like the personal passages in Montaigne. I wish there had been more of them, or that you would favour the world with some observations on men and things, which one who is alike a statesman, a philosopher, and a scholar could alone supply. In your ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... contained everything it should not, and nothing it should contain. But that was why it was a poet's box. If it had held a Harpagon's Interest Computer, instead of a well-thumbed Virgil, or Oldcodger's Commercial Statistics for 184—, instead of an antique, leather-covered Montaigne, Straws would have had no use for the cupboard. It was at once his library—a scanty one, for the poet held tenaciously to but a few books—his sideboard, his secretaire, his music cabinet—giving ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... note,) it contains the unfinished and disarranged for a larger work. An anonymous writer, supposed by Luden to be M. Becker, conceives that it was intended as an episode in his larger history. According to M. Guizot, "Tacite a peint les Germains comme Montaigne et Rousseau les sauvages, dans un acces d'humeur contre sa patrie: son livre est une satire des moeurs Romaines, l'eloquente boutade d'un patriote philosophe qui veut voir la vertu la, ou il ne rencontre pas la mollesse honteuse et la depravation savante ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... injustice and cruelty which the least civilised would abhor, and that many of the most absurd opinions and doctrines which have been imposed in the Dark Ages of ignorance continue to be the opinions and doctrines of ages enlightened by philosophy and learning. "If I was a philosopher," says Montaigne, "I would naturalise art instead of artilising Nature." The expression is odd, but the sense is good, and what he recommends would be done if the reasons that have been given did not stand in the way; if the self-interest of some men, the madness of others, and ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... observer of men and manners, and they display a subtle analysis of character, as well as a breadth of observation, which are remarkable. With much of occasional force, these Essays have sufficient solidity to make a book; and while they recall the wit of Montaigne and the playfulness of Addison, they are animated by a better moral tone, and cover a ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... only seen, but at once noted down and studied by him; and in its delicately skilful 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,") ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... she was reported to have taught her children "surtout des traictz de cet athee Machiavel." Boucher asserted that Henry III. carried him in his pocket: "qui perpetuus ei in sacculo atque manibus est"; and Montaigne confirms the story when he says: "Et dict on, de ce temps, que Machiavel est encores ailleurs en credit." The pertinently appropriate quotation by which the Queen sanctified her murderous resolve was supplied, not by her father's rejected and discredited monitor, but by a bishop at the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... good as to let me read them, and I read them with great pleasure. One of them, a dialogue between Locke and Montaigne, is all admirable piece of ridicule on ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... learning, the fairness of his judgments, the richness, concentration, and precision of his style. His great successor, Gibbon, called him a "philosophical historian, whose writings will instruct the last generations of mankind"; and Montaigne knew no author "who, in a work of history, has taken so broad a view of human events or given a more ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... does this 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 ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... in addressing his readers has been said to be founded on that of Sir Thomas Browne, and in a measure there can be little doubt that it was so—but only in a measure, for it is something the same egotism as that of Montaigne, is, indeed, the natural attitude of the familiar essayist who must be egotistic, not from self-consciousness but from the lack of it. In putting his opinions and experiences in the first person, we feel that Lamb did so almost unconsciously, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... savage ferocity. The judge would probably think he was showing impartiality by punishing him for his qualities of charm and high intelligence. For the first time in my life I understood the full significance of Montaigne's confession that if he were accused of stealing the towers of Notre Dame, he would fly the kingdom rather than risk a trial, and Montaigne was a lawyer. I set to work at once to ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Madame de Maintenon, or Walpole, to Grolier, or Askew, or De Thou, or Heber. Such copies should be handed down from worthy owners to owners not unworthy; such servants of literature should never have careless masters. A man may prefer to read for pleasure in a good clear reprint. M. Charpentier's "Montaigne" serves the turn, but it is natural to treasure more "Les Essais de Michel Seigneur de Montaigne," that were printed by Francoise le Febre, of Lyon, in 1595. It is not a beautiful book; the type is small, and rather blunt, but William Drummond of Hawthornden has written ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... are not all. I agree with our old friend, Montaigne, about that. By the way, which do you prefer, ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... 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 ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... or, morall, politike, and militarie Discourses of Lord Michael De Montaigne, Knight Of the noble Order of Saint Michael, and one of the Gentlemen in Ordinary of the French Kings Chamber. The Third Edition. Whereunto is now newly added an Index of the principall matters and personages mentioned in this Booke. London, Printed by M. Flesher, ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... secretly in order to attack the opinions he believed false. To compose his manuscript against God, against all religion, against the Bible and the Church, he had no other assistance than the Bible itself, Moreri Montaigne, ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... the United States doesn't recognize any classes—and I don't know why you and I should. We both like Montaigne and Debussy. You've even condescended to laugh with me at times about something funny in the shop. Of course not lately; but you used to. In everything worth anything aren't we ...
— The Gibson Upright • Booth Tarkington
... protest beforehand, that I have not allowed myself to be influenced by any private consideration, by any feeling of hatred, affection, or gratitude. I have followed no impulse but that of my conscience, and I may say with Montaigne: "This is an ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... clock. We 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... whom Pascal set himself, from the time of his first conversations with M. de Saci at Port-Royal, was Montaigne. One cannot destroy Pascal, certainly; but of all authors Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... 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 the first important commentator ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... to his tutor, the remainder is due to action. Let us employ this short time in necessary instruction. Away with your crabbed, logical subtleties; they are abuses, things by which our lives can never be made better."[8] In these words Montaigne writes against the false ideal that the mere accumulation of knowledge apart from any purpose it may serve in enabling us better to understand either the world of nature or of history should be the aim of education, and throughout all education we must ever keep in mind that knowledge ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... there is not a nation, observes the humorous Montaigne, even to the people who when they salute turn their backs on their friends, but that can be justified ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... and is a rarest gift, being in all great masters one and the same thing,—in 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 are not always finished to the eye, but are finished to the mind. The sentences are involved, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... is vulgarly called a snap-judgment indeed. His quaintness never runs into superficial conceit, but embodies always a deep and comprehensive wisdom. He insinuates truth with a friendly indirectness, and banters us out of our folly with a foreign instance. Plutarch or Montaigne is not more happy in historical parallels, for personal reflection and sober application to actual duty. Never was fancy more alert in the service of piety. His imagination is as luminous as Sir Thomas Browne's, and, if less peculiar ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... siege, attended by his favourite cats. Cardinal Richelieu was also fond of cats; and when we have enumerated the names of Cowper and Dr Johnson, of Thomas Gray and Isaac Newton, and, above all, of the tender-hearted and meditative Montaigne, the list is far from complete of those who have bestowed on the feline race some portion of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... has told us himself very simply, and more fully than men of his type generally do; for he was not, like Montaigne, one whose chief study was himself. Yet, though he has done this, it is not easy for us to fully understand him. It is perhaps impossible to place oneself in the centre of that horizon which was of necessity his and belonged to his day, a vast circle from which men could no more ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... mention many instances of this kind, but I shall reserve them till I have grown older; then I will be as garrulous as Montaigne. As it is, I think I hear the reader say—"All this may be very true, but what has it to do with the novel?" Nothing, I grant; but it has a great deal to do with making a book—for I have completed a whole ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 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 ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... on the rocks near by show us where the summer neighbors of our host live, but at all seasons his wild neighbors are the ones he hobnobs with the most; while his indoor companions are Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Carlyle, Arnold, Wordsworth, Darwin, Huxley, Emerson, Whitman, Bergson, and many ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... said, hath come a chance to prove thyself that may never come again. Sir James tells me that thou art passably ripe in skill. Thou must now show whether that be so or no. Hast thou ever heard of the Sieur de la Montaigne?" ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... from illuminated manuscripts. Book-lectern used in private houses. Book-desks revolving round a central screw. Desks attached to chairs. Wall-cupboards. A scholar's room in the fifteenth century. Study of the Duke of Urbino. Library of Margaret of Austria. Library of Montaigne. Conclusion 291 ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... still often read. The works of Bacon and of Adam Smith on "Moral Sentiments;" the famous treatise on the "Natural History of Man," by the Rev. John Adams; the later works of Buckle, Spencer, Darwin, Draper, Lecky, and other robust wielders of the Anglo-Saxon pen, as well as the works of Montaigne, Montesquieu, La Fontaine, and Voltaire, are all works that the medical man could probably read with more profit than loss of time. In fact, either Hume, Macaulay, or any philosophical work on history will furnish to the physician additional knowledge of use in ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... sensuous 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 ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... wanders, one recognises the gay, intelligent countenance of a Frenchman on his travels, who idly follows his inclinations, and does not trouble to enter very deeply into the spirit of the people he meets, but gleans all he can, and then reproduces it with a French complexion—after the manner of Montaigne in Italy, who compared Verona to Poitiers, and Padua to Bordeaux, and who, when he was in Florence, paid much less attention to Michelangelo than to "a very strangely shaped sheep, and an animal the size of a large mastiff, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... brain. At one o'clock in the morning he switched on all the lights, rose out of bed, and walked aimlessly about the chamber. Something, some morbid impulse, prompted him to take up the General Catalogue, which lay next to a priceless copy of the 1603 edition of Florio's 'Montaigne.' There were pages and pages about funerals in the General Catalogue, and forty fine photographic specimens ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... First spoke Montaigne, denouncing the grasping spirit of the nobles. Then spoke Savaron, stinging them with sarcasm, torturing them with rhetoric, crushing them with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... witches were pronounced intrinsically incredible. The dreams of a disordered imagination, or the terrors of the rack, would account for many of them; but even when it is impossible to explain the evidence, it is quite unnecessary to believe it. "After all," Montaigne said, "it is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men alive on ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Mr. Fraser to send me Magazine, and I have now received four numbers of the Sartor Resartus, for whose light thanks evermore. I am glad that one living scholar is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever were before; who, as Montaigne says, "puts his ear close by himself, and holds his breath and listens." And none can be offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund. And 't is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms, our politics, and schools, and religion. I say our, for it ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of verses prefixed; 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 in ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... dimples deep into the delicately tinted pink-and-brown, where wind and sun and wholesome exercise had set the seal of absolute health, and took from a niche in the logs of the wall a stained and dog-eared volume. He looked, and it was, indeed, the old saint and sinner, Montaigne. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... "dislike to the Church of Rome." La Fontaine was with difficulty brought, on his death-bed, to make public satisfaction for the scandal which he had done to religion by his immoral Contes, though at length he threw into the fire a piece which he had just finished for the stage. Montaigne, whose Essays "make an epoch in literature," by "their influence upon the tastes and opinions of Europe;" whose "school embraces a large proportion of French and English literature;" and of whose "brightness and felicity of genius there ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... this, her reading at this epoch was without any order or method. She read everything voraciously, mixing all the philosophers up together. She read Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, but she kept Rousseau apart from the others. She devoured the books of the moralists and poets, La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare. All this reading was too much for her and excited her brain. She had reserved Chateaubriand's ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... of 1616 gives the name Riviere 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 ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... that 1839 edition of Shelley, edited by Mrs. Shelley, that I once nearly sold to the British Museum because the Keeper of Printed Books thought he hadn't got a copy—only he had! And there, in a cage by himself, because of his terrible hugeness, is the 1652 Paris edition of Montaigne's Essays. And so I might continue, and so I would continue, were it not essential that I ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... king's library, we come to cases in which—with their pages open beneath the glass—we see books worth their weight in gold, either for their uniqueness or their beauty, or because they have belonged to illustrious men, and have their autographs in them. The copy of the English translation of Montaigne, containing the strange scrawl of Shakespeare's autograph, is here. Bacon's name is in another book; Queen Elizabeth's in another; and there is a little devotional volume, with Lady Jane Grey's writing in it. She is supposed to have taken it to the scaffold with her. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Question, hypothesis, lamentation, and platitude 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 ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... done, and my belief is that art will justify itself better in the market than commercialism did. A more modern instance of expansion for commercial reasons defeating fitness in design is furnished by Waters' translation of "The Journal of Montaigne's Travels." Here we have three small volumes outwardly attractive, but printed on paper thick enough for catalogue cards, and therefore too stiff for the binding, also in type too large to be pleasant. The whole should have been issued in one volume of the same ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... Montaigne's illustration of atmosphere was Julius Caesar. When the great Roman was still a youth, he was captured by pirates and chained to the oars as a galley-slave; but Caesar told stories, sang songs, declaimed with endless good humor. Chains ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... following editorial comment:—"These two lines are a versification of a saying of Montaigne." (!!!) The saying is not by Montaigne, but ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.02.23 • Various
... troubling effect upon his thought and temperament goes far to explain the interest and suggestiveness of his mental history. The language he speaks is the language of that French criticism which—we have Sainte-Beuve's authority for it—is best described by the motto of Montaigne, "Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, a la francaise," and the thought he tries to express in it is thought torn and strained by the constant effort to reach the All, the totality of ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... book as follows in his Book-Hunter: "This, it will 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, you will find Jean Baptiste, but not Jean Jacques. ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... 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 the captivation ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... that it is the man behind the book. It is the fashion of the day to attribute all splendid results to genius and culture. But genius and culture are not enough. "All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness," says Montaigne. The quality of simple manhood, and the universal human traits which form the bond of union between man and man,—which form the basis of society, of the family, of government, of friendship,— are quite overlooked; and the credit is given to some special facility, or to brilliant ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... been close enough to demonstrate that beyond a doubt that planet has no moon or satellite such as Cassini, Short, Montaigne of Limoges, Montbarron, and some other astronomers have imagined to exist. "Had there been such a satellite," said Servadac, "we might have captured it in passing. But what can be the meaning," he added seriously, "of all this ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... 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
... 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. His family grew up around him; and he probably visited the town as rarely as the present ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... a fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne's Jacob's-ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton's version) Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth, undreamed of before, that marvel, a poet divine who can bore. Or, out of my study, the scholar thrown off, Nature holds up her shield 'gainst the sneer and the scoff; the landscape, forever consoling and kind, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... spirit, its high ideals, its fantastic gallantry, its ingenious adventures, its mechanism of symbolic wonders, and its flowing style have entranced readers of such various types as Francis I. and Charles V., Ariosto and Montaigne. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... children or parents. So I was, very reluctantly, about to abandon the enterprise, when it chanced that, being unable to compose myself to sleep, a few nights since, I took up, according to my custom on such occasions, an old copy of Montaigne, the usual companion of my vigils, the fellow-occupant of my pillow, and the only moralist whose musings one can read with pleasure on ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... in the British Museum which would have, for many people, a greater value than any other single volume in the world; it is a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne, and it bears Shakespeare's autograph on a flyleaf. There are other books which must have had the same ownership; among them were Holinshed's "Chronicles" and North's translation of Plutarch. Shakespeare would have laid posterity under still greater obligations, ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... have not given it more pleasure than has that autobiography in which the supreme scoundrel of the Renaissance relates the story of his splendour and his shame. The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter very little. He may be a sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to silence. The mode of thought that Cardinal Newman represented—if that can be called a mode of thought which ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... Finis of the volume, which is printed in such sober, black, italic type, I remember a good saying of old Michel de Montaigne in one of his essays,—not the exact words, but the soul of his remarks. He says that we cannot judge whether a man has been truly fortunate in life until we have seen him act with tranquillity and contentment in the last scene ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... reflection of themselves, in others, of the impression they make on the world around. Woman, we suspect, lives always before her glass, and makes a mirror of existence. But for downright self-analysis, we repeat, she has little or no taste. A female Montaigne, a female Thackeray, would ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... ferns, Shakspeare, of rough sketches of the men and women whom he has made immortal. Saintly Herbert lay side by side with Saint Augustine's confessions. Milton and Montaigne stood socially together, and Andersen's lovely "Mrchen" fluttered its pictured leaves in the middle of an open Plato; while several books in unknown tongues were half-hidden by volumes of Browning, ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... the subject, what signifies whether the form is a little more or less ornate and luxurious? Meantime, I think to set a few heads before me, as good texts for winter evening entertainments. I wrote a deal about Napoleon a few months ago, after reading a library of memoirs. Now I have Plato, Montaigne, and Swedenborg, and more in the clouds behind. What ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 when it ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... country. For, while Olivetanus in his admirable version laid the foundation upon which all the later and more accurate translations have been reared, by the excellence of his modes of expression he exerted an influence upon the French language perhaps not inferior to that of Calvin or Montaigne.[458] ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... literature in the sixteenth century had become so neglected, and was so lacking in cultivation; so little adapted to poetry, that the nation seemed in danger of losing all its earlier traditions. For a hundred years France was given over to profane and light literature. Montaigne, Charyon, Ronsard and de Balzac are some of the names of this period. The death of a cat or dog was made the subject of a poem that was no real poetry. It is due to the women of France—to Madame de Rambouillet and her confreres, and to the literary ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... bad French," she was steeped in French scholarship. She had read Plato and Sophocles under the stimulating guidance of William Cory, and her love of Italy had taught her a great deal of Italian. The authors whom she enjoyed and quoted were a motley crowd—Dante and Rabelais, Pascal and Montaigne, George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, Tolstoi and George Borrow, "Mark Rutherford" and Samuel Butler, Fenelon and Renan and Anatole France. Her vein of poetic feeling was strong and genuine. In addressing some young ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... or joking, or rhyming, during those two short years of college life, he read: Cudworth's "Intellectual System," Hobbes's "Dialogues," Bacon's "Essays," Plutarch's "Morals," Cicero's "De Officiis," Montaigne's "Essays," Rousseau's "Emile," Demosthenes's "Orations," Aristotle's "Politics," Ralt's "Dictionary of Trade," ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... living in an intellectual twilight. It was the twilight of dawn. At one extremity we have mysticism which culminated in the speculations of Bruno and Campanella; at the other we have the scepticism of Montaigne, Charron, and Sanchez. The bewildered condition of knowledge is indicated by the fact that while Bruno and Campanella accepted the Copernican astronomy, it was rejected by one who in many other respects may claim to be reckoned as a modern—I mean ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... of the room. Always thoughtful, she had placed a stool there 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' fate. Curiously enough, the essay concludes with these words, almost ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... effect. But the first class of writers have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in the interest or value of the matter; it lies not in force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The three first are but infants to the three second; and yet each, in a particular point ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a propos of your last letter (and by a very natural connection of ideas), that chapter of father Montaigne's entitled "some lines from Virgil." What he said of chastity is precisely what I believe. It is the effort that is fine and not the abstinence in itself. Otherwise shouldn't one curse the flesh like the Catholics? God knows whither that ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... good his intended movement on Chalons. Such a position he found in the range of uplands, which, intersected at points by ravines, with brooks and difficult ground in front and with belts of wood in the near distance, extends from the village of Gravelotte on the north-east to Privat-la-Montaigne, beyond the road that runs from Metz to the whilom German frontier; and, throughout the whole of the previous day the Marshal had been busily engaged in stationing his troops along this line collecting every means of defence which could add to ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... such travellers as deign to accept its poor hospitality. It is an inn for the people now, for wine carters, and the better sort of hill peasants; it was once the best and most fashionable in Rome, and there the great Montaigne once dwelt, and is believed to have written at least a part of his famous Essay on Vanity. It is the Albergo dell' Orso, the 'Bear Inn,' and perhaps it is not a coincidence that Vanozza's sign of the Lion should have faced the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Lastly, 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 it was acted, and did me ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... its sunrise, in which we, who look back, think we see a futile Renaissance, then as now the spring flowers came up amid the decaying foliage. At this period there came a demand for the remodelling of education through the great figure of modern times, Montaigne, that skeptic who had so deep a reverence for realities. In his Essays, in his Letters to the Countess of Gurson, are found all of the elements for the education of the future. About the great German and Swiss specialists ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... and the small, with complete detachment. Naturally, the art is the detachment and the lesson is in the perfect representation. The literary man may indignantly repudiate the idea of "preaching." "To go preach to the first passer by," wrote Montaigne, "to become tutor to the ignorance of the first I meet, is a thing I abhor." He may have abhorred the idea, but through his essays he made himself tutor to innocence and ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... immense confusion Constant insinuation of sound doctrines And of practical suggestions Diderot not always above literary trifling No taste for barren erudition On Montaigne and Bayle Occasional bursts of moralising Varying attitude as to theology The practical arts Second-hand sources Inconsistencies Treatment of metaphysics On Spinosa On Leibnitz On Liberty Astonishing self-contradiction Political articles On the mechanism of government ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... qui en approche, mais qui n'est pas la veritable: et ils l'expriment pourtant bien, parce qu'ils prennent le mot propre de cette idee a peu pres ressemblante a l'autre, et en meme temps inferieure." Montaigne, La Bruyere, Pascal, and all great writers, have had individual ideas, hence a singular style, as it ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... 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 ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... 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 ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the chief ministers to self-culture. Books in a special manner represent intellect to those who can appreciate them. We cannot estimate in this aspect their importance. They are in regard to self-culture what Montaigne calls "the best viaticum for the journey of life." When we think of what we owe to them, we may enter into the feelings of Charles Lamb, who "wished to ask a grace before reading more than a grace ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... Renaissance, which had filled the pages of Rabelais with such a superabundant energy, appears in a quieter and more cultivated form. The first fine rapture was over; and the impulsive ardours of creative thought were replaced by the calm serenity of criticism and reflection. Montaigne has none of the coarseness, none of the rollicking fun, none of the exuberant optimism, of Rabelais; he is a refined gentleman, who wishes to charm rather than to electrify, who writes in the quiet, easy tone of familiar conversation, who smiles, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... their tribe. He had attempted to read; a woman had told him to read French novels, but he found them only a clumsy representation of the life which, for years, he had practically been leading. An accident made him acquainted with Rabelais and Montaigne; and he had relished them, for he had a fine sense of humour. He might have pursued these studies, and perhaps have found in them a slight and occasional distraction, but a clever man he met at a guingette at Passy, whither he had gone to try ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... Montaigne said, "I always feel a pleasure in paying my debts, because I discharge my shoulders of a wearisome load and of an image of slavery." Johnson might well call Economy the mother of Liberty. No man can ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... seen to the 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 are ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... it embaseth it. For these winding, and 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, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... translate it better; for the old-fashioned, 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 Devil's Pool • George Sand
... pother, The diff'rence was so small his brain Outweigh'd his rage but half a grain; Which made some take him for a tool That knaves do work with, call'd a fool. For 't has been held by many, that As Montaigne, playing with his cat, Complains she thought him but an ass, Much more she would Sir Hudibras, (For that the name our valiant Knight To all his challenges did write) But they're mistaken very much, 'Tis plain enough he was no such. We grant although he had much wit, H' was very ...
— English Satires • Various
... lassitude or 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 in any ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... 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. The rest of his "exquisite ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... distinction. She was, 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 to imitate her. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... influence in the maintenance of morality, was at the same time undermined by the sceptical philosophy of Greece, and by contact with conflicting religions, the spectacle of which had its effect in producing the scepticism of Montaigne. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Dedication of the 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 ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... some solitude is essential to our richest culture. Our higher nature demands time for reflection and meditation. But the monks carried this principle to an extreme, and they overestimated its benefits. "Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and inordinate desires," says Montaigne, "do not leave us because we forsake our native country, they often follow us even to cloisters and philosophical schools; nor deserts, nor caves, nor hair shirts, nor fasts, can ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... qui naturellement se changent en loups, en juments, et puis encores en hommes?"—MONTAIGNE, Apologie ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... page melts us into tears by a pathos only equalled by that of Sterne's sick Lieutenant. He is Montaigne and Bacon under one hat. His varied qualities would suffice for the mental furnishing of half a ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... takes acquaintance to found a noble esteem, but politeness prepares the way. Indeed, as Montaigne says, Courtesy begets esteem at sight. Urbanity is half of affability, and affability is ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... and 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 Church, imposed ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... Helena Montaigne, too, was trying to clasp her in equally tender arms, and Molly reluctantly released Dorothy, while she let Mr. Ford lead her to his ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... whither the Emperor used to make 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, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... through personal and private experiences. As a consequence, mind, the source and possessor of knowledge, was thought of as wholly individual. Thus upon the educational side, we find educational reformers, like Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, henceforth vehemently denouncing all learning which is acquired on hearsay, and asserting that even if beliefs happen to be true, they do not constitute knowledge unless they have grown up in and been tested by personal experience. The ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... Montaigne en Italie, par la Suisse et l'Allemagne, en 1580-81. Paris, 1774. 4to.—Italy and the Tyrol are particularly the objects of those travels, which are interesting, much more on account of the name of the author, and of the insight they afford into his temper and feelings, than ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... quill for essays that 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. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... be attributed, and there is certainly not a single French author to whom one could truthfully attribute them all. Voltaire insisted that what was not clear was not French,—so much, to the conception of this typical Frenchman, was clearness the genius of the national speech. Still, Montaigne, for example, was sometimes obscure; and even the tragedist Corneille wrote here and there what his commentator, Voltaire, declared to be hardly intelligible. So, too, Rabelais, coarsest of humorists, offending decorum in various ways, offended it most of all exactly in that article ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... had come, 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 into the detective's ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... I have used in this book has been gathered from many sources, and, as far as possible, references have been given, but I have sought for, and taken, information wherever it could best be found. As Montaigne wrote: "I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Florio with Shakespeare. The industrious Savoyard, besides his dictionary—of great use at a time when the tour to Italy was a necessary completion of a rich gallant's education—translated the essays of that delightful old Gascon egotist, Montaigne. Now in a copy of Florio's "Montaigne" there was found some years ago one of the very few genuine Shakespeare signatures. Moreover, as Florio speaks of the Earl of Southampton as his steady patron, we may fairly presume that the great poet, who must have ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... comical universe I don't laugh at, my little Blanquette," said he. "I am like good old Montaigne—I rather laugh than weep, because to laugh is the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... 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 volumes again which can claim only the inglorious senility ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Nouer l'aiguillette, of which the extraordinary effect is described by Montaigne, is an Oriental custom still practised.—Mr. Hobhouse's Journey through Albania, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... historians." We next come to Jacobus de Voragine, a Dominican friar and archbishop of Genoa, in 1292. His Golden Legend was the delight of our ancestors during the ages which preceded the revival of letters. The library of no monastery was without it. Like the essays of Montaigne, it was to be found on the shelf of every private person; and, for a long time after the invention of printing, no work more often issued from the press. After enjoying the highest degree of reputation, it lost much of its celebrity, in consequence of the Lives of ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... work upon the destinies of the world in the production of great men. For in that period in Italy we find Tasso, the greatest of modern epic poets; then too lived Galileo and Kepler, the astronomers; in France we find the philosophic essayist, Montaigne; in Spain the world-renowned Cervantes, the author of the immortal Don Quixote; in England both Bacon and Shakspere, beside a host of other writers, generals, admirals and artists. This same age is the most flourishing ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... 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 of inditing a list of old primers and grammars, to count ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the motto of Montaigne, As also of the first academicians: That all is dubious which man may attain, Was one of their most favourite positions. There's no such thing as certainty, that's plain As any of Mortality's conditions; So little do we know what we're about in This ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... these phrases that are meant to seem so humble, really apologising for what was the essential quality of his genius? Montaigne, who (it is Lamb that says it) 'anticipated all the discoveries of succeeding essayists,' affected no humility in the statement of almost exactly the same mental complexion. 'I take the first argument that fortune offers me,' ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... all directions. The Casino offers concerts and occasional plays and operettas, and a band in the main promenade entertains regularly the listening evening saunterers. Rightly does the town aim still to merit the praise given by Montaigne, who paid it a marked tribute ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... and then always busy or discontented: for these poor rich-men, we Anglers pity them perfectly, and stand in no need to borrow their thoughts to think ourselves so happy. No, no, Sir, we enjoy a contentedness above the reach of such dispositions, and as the learned and ingenuous Montaigne says, like himself, freely, " When my Cat and I entertain each other with mutual apish tricks, as playing with a garter, who knows but that I make my Cat more sport than she makes me? Shall I conclude her to be simple, that has her time to begin or refuse, to play as ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... guillotine. But, pooh! Master Laurent had too pretty a head to fall under the executioner's ignoble knife. The judges who condemned him, the curious who expected to witness him executed, had forgotten what Montaigne calls the corporeal recommendation of beauty. There was a woman belonging to the jailer of Yssen-geaux, his daughter, sister or niece; history—for it is history and not romance that I am telling you—history does not say which. At all events the woman, whoever ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... bolder and more chilling than Machiavelli, more detached than Montaigne. But Erasmus will not have it credited to him: it is Folly who speaks. He purposely makes us tread the round of the circulus vitiosus, as in the old saw: A Cretan said, all ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... much of him as I hope I understand and am afraid I do not), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Wuthering Heights, Lamb's Essays, Johnson's Lives, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Gibbon, the immortal Pepys, the egregious Boswell, various American children's books that I loved as a child and read and love to this day; various French children's books, loved for the same reason; whole rows of German children's books, on which I was brought up, with their ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... flattering voice.— With Reynolds' pencil, vivid, bold, and true, So fervent Boswell gives him to our view. In every trait we see his mind expand; The master rises by the pupil's hand; We love the writer, praise his happy vein, Grac'd with the naivete of the sage Montaigne. Hence not alone are brighter parts display'd, But ev'n the specks of character portray'd: We see the Rambler with fastidious smile Mark the lone tree, and note the heath-clad isle; But when the heroick tale of ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... Essayist, Charles 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 of pleasantry, ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... 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 c'etoit elle, parceque ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... will rather give you an appetite than offend you with satiety." They were the first essays so-called in the language. "The word," said Bacon, "is late, but the thing is ancient." The word he took from the French essais of Montaigne, the first two books of which had been published in 1592. Bacon testified that his essays were the most popular of his writings because they "came home to men's business and bosoms." Their alternate ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... temperament. Jean 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 ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Bernard rode from sunrise to sunset along the Lake Leman without once putting his mule out of a walk; so much delectation the holy man felt in beholding the beauty of the water and the mountains, and in "chewing the cud of his own sweet or bitter fancies." And good Michel Seigneur de Montaigne took a week for his journey from Nice to Pisa, although his horse was one of the smartest trotters in Gascony, merely for the pleasure he felt in following the by-lanes. And did not Richard Hooker receive from Bishop Jewell his blessing and his walking-staff, and yet with such poor means ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... called Books and Bookmen knows about Thomas Blinton. He was a man who wickedly adorned his volumes with morocco bindings, while his wife 'sighed in vain for some old point d'Alencon lace.' He was a man who was capable of bidding fifteen pounds for a Foppens edition of the essays of Montaigne, though fifteen pounds happened to be 'exactly the amount which he owed his plumber and gas-fitter, a worthy man with a large family.' From this fictitious Thomas Blinton all the way back to Richard Heber, who ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... material subjects, and indicate anything but a worldly or sordid nature. 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... 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 ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... universe to extension and local movement. There are the central dogmas of logic, metaphysics and physics, from which start the subsequent inquiries of Locke, Leibnitz and Newton. They are also the direct antitheses to the scepticism of Montaigne and Pascal, to the materialism of Gassendi and Hobbes, and to the superstitious anthropomorphism which defaced the reawakening sciences of nature. Descartes laid down the lines on which modern philosophy and science were to build. But himself no trained ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... man found out that among the girls it was common gossip that she was to marry Jean Pierre, the Fifth Avenue jeweller, of the firm of Lang & Pierre down on the next block. Pierre is due in New York on La Montaigne to-night or to-morrow morning. ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... attempted none had ventured before him, the amount of work he accomplished is fairly incredible. To enumerate the immense tasks he undertook—some single volumes alone containing hundreds of illustrations—will give some faint idea of his industry. Besides those already mentioned are Montaigne, Dante, the Bible, Milton, Rabelais, Tennyson's "Idyls of the King," "The Ancient Mariner," Shakespeare, "Legende de Croquemitaine," La Fontaine's "Fables," and ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... some surprise that I read lately a lament that Dr. Holmes had not written "a great novel"—a task which would have been as unsuitable to him as to Dr. Johnson or to Montaigne. It is not a question of a greater or less talent, but of a wholly different talent—as distinct as metaphysics and portrait-painting. The same critic complains because Holmes has not been "in earnest" like Carlyle. While the genius of that great writer is indisputable, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... about in worlds not realised." Yonder on the turret of that grey Gothic castle, whose pinnacles point ever upwards to the skies, they stand and wait, a glorious throng; and as they stand they wave him onwards. Dante, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Plutarch, Montaigne, and many another hero of old is waiting there. See the sharp-pointed features of the Italian bard, and Homer no longer blind! The two are holding animated converse, and ever beckoning him on. And a voice seemed to speak out loud and clear amid the ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... breakfasting with Spero, a perfumed note was sent up to his residence in the Rue Montaigne, wherein Jane Zild declared her willingness to appear in the painter's parlors and sing a ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... adversity could have taught him as much wisdom as was learnt by Scipio from the highest prosperities. This would be no wonder if it were as truly as it is colourably and wittily said by Monsieur de Montaigne, that ambition itself might teach us to love solitude: there is nothing does so much hate to have companions. It is true, it loves to have its elbows free, it detests to have company on either side, but it ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... the delight of Europe, both lived to an advanced age, and died nearly at the same time. Their fortune bore, too, a resemblance; for they were both pensioned, but lived and died separated in the distant courts of Vienna and Madrid. Montaigne and Charron were rivals, but always friends; such was Montaigne's affection for Charron, that he permitted him by his will to bear the full arms of his family; and Charron evinced his gratitude to the manes of his departed friend, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... I went to Mr. Beers and saw a set of Montaigne's 'Essays' in French in eight volumes, duodecimo, handsomely bound in calf and gilt, for two dollars. The reason they are so cheap is because they are wicked and bad books for me or anybody else to read. I got them because they were cheap, and have ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... no longer, was in the Avenue Montaigne. It suited my tastes precisely, being extremely quiet, as it looked upon a retired garden, and the rooms were perfectly clean. There was only one story above the ground-floor, and here I took a bedroom and sitting-room looking upon the garden. ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... 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. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... fairly well off. Of four children, our Balzac was the eldest. The third was his sister Laure, who throughout his life was the most intimate friend he had, and to whom we owe his rescue from much scandalous and untrue gossip. From her we learn that their father was a combination of Montaigne, Rabelais, and ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the preface to the "Essays," as translated by John Florio. A copy of Florio's "Montaigne" is known to have been in the library of Shakespeare, one of the few extant autographs of the poet being in a copy of this translation now preserved in the library ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... only a man, wavering and changeable, to use Montaigne's expression, for his eyes, contradicting the brusqueness of his speech, rested long, and not without envy, on this beautiful and tempting fruit which his fate forbade him to gather. The more he admired her freshness, and the more he inhaled her sweetness, the more ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... brain. At one o'clock in the morning he switched on all the lights, rose out of bed, and walked aimlessly about the chamber. Something, some morbid impulse, prompted him to take up the General Catalogue, which lay next to a priceless copy of the 1603 edition of Florio's 'Montaigne.' There were pages and pages about funerals in the General Catalogue, and forty fine photographic specimens of ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... become the primary language of the master of the house. I 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 ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... the 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 ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... in desires, sentiments, and tastes, they become attracted to each other. Or in spite of natural disagreements or differences, through the force of circumstances they become welded together in friendship. Montaigne describes such an attachment, in which the souls mix and work themselves into one piece with so perfect a mixture that there is no more sign of a seam by which they were ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... same time an abridgment, which have taken their place in the rank of British classics. It is the highest praise that can be given to a work of this character to say that it may be placed on the bookshelf side by side with Jeremy Collier's "Marcus Aurelius," Leland's "Demosthenes," and the "Montaigne" of Charles Cotton. It embalms the genuine spirit and life of an Oriental poem in the simple yet tasteful form of English narrative. The blending of verse and prose is a happy expedient. If we may use the metaphor ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... correspondences are assonances and not rhymes. In style these Chansons de Geste are rapid, military, but above all dramatic and popular. They are without shading, spontaneous, no labor, no false art, no study. Above all it is a style to which one can apply the words of Montaigne, and it is the same upon paper as in the mouth. Really these verses are made to be upon the living lip, and not upon the cold and dead parchment of the manuscript. The oldest manuscripts are small, in order that they may be carried in the pocket for use of traveling jongleurs and singers. They ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... 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
... waves, and bring her news of strange countries. The effect of these discoveries, enormously and increasingly important from the material standpoint, was first felt in the widening of the imagination. Camoens wrote the epic of Da Gama, More placed his Utopia in America, and Montaigne speculated on the curious customs of the redskins. Ariosto wrote of the wonders of the new world in his poem, and Luther occasionally alluded to ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith |
