"Montaigne" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... almost a month 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." ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... for somebody to hold it, and Chaos come again in the South Carolina teapot. We will only say that we have found grandeur and consolation in a starlit night without caring to ask what it meant, save grandeur and consolation; we have liked Montaigne, as some ten generations before us have done, without thinking him so systematic as some more eminently tedious (or shall we say tediously eminent?) authors; we have thought roses as good in their way as cabbages, though the latter would have made a better show in the witness-box, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... the next 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... say of a thief," asks Montaigne, "that he has a handsome leg?" It is a far more serious claim that we have to put forward in behalf of Villon. Beside that of his contemporaries, his writing, so full of colour, so eloquent, so picturesque, stands out in an almost miraculous isolation. If only one or two of the chroniclers ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 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 force. Innocence is ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... 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 thread that ties ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... that honour. Such was the selection in the scriptural case of David, and others: and that having that day met to perform this important duty, they, on these principles, brought forward their future sovereign, John, earl of Montaigne, brother to the deceased king[90]. John, who was present, signified his concurrence with these sentiments; and a few days afterwards, (June 7) we find a law published from Northampton in which he asserts, that 'God ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... not wholly an affair of the 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 ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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
... on behalf of its opposite, would she, while defending the French Constitution, have made use of such absurd and offensive nonsense as that which this celebrated rhetorician made use of in attacking it? Would not the adopted daughter of Montaigne have better defended the rights of citizens in France, in 1614, than the Councillor Courtin, who was a believer in magic and occult powers? Was not the Princesse des Ursins superior to Chamillard? Could not ...
— The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women • Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet
... 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 for ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... reverence Of foles, whan that he was ded, The fot hath torned to the hed, 1040 And clepen him god of nature, For so thei maden his figure. An other god, so as thei fiele, Which Jupiter upon Samele Begat in his avouterie, Whom, forto hide his lecherie, That non therof schal take kepe, In a Montaigne forto kepe, Which Dyon hihte and was in Ynde, He sende, in bokes as I finde: 1050 And he be name Bachus hihte, Which afterward, whan that he mihte, A wastour was, and al his rente In wyn and bordel he despente. Bot ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... The Prince was Catharine of Medici, and 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, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... life 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, and a few fathers. ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... voteless. How often in his prison he must have yearned for those old Landtag days—apart from his advocacy of the peasants, he loves to speak. In two hours he would traverse the whole gamut of human thought, expressing opinions to which John Hampden and Jack Cade and Montaigne and Machiavelli would in turn assent. The words used to rush from his lips in a torrent, while to many of his faithful peasant followers he seemed, throughout his discourse, to be in direct contact with the Almighty. Next to the Almighty the Croatian ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... 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
... philosophers Montaigne and Descartes, seduced at an early age by the allurements of gambling, managed at length to overcome the evil, presenting examples of reformation—which proves that this mania is not absolutely incurable. Descartes ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Madame de la Mariniere was obliged to live with her husband's literary admirations, as well as with his political opinions, so Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, with many earlier and healthier geniuses, such as Montaigne, looked down in handsomely gilt bindings from the upper shelves. High up they were: there was a concession. In the lower shelves lived Bousset, and other Catholic writers; the modern spirit in religion being represented by Chateaubriand's five volumes of ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... beginning to produce new fiction at a still lower price. Besides novels he published solid works of biography at thirty-one and six, art books at a guinea, travel books at fifteen shillings, flighty historical works at twelve-and-sixpence, and cheap editions of Montaigne's Essays and "Robinson Crusoe" at a shilling. Some idea of his business methods may be derived from the fact that it pleased him to reflect that all the other publishers were producing exactly the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... 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
... 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. ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... of themselves in themselves, but of the 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, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... 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
... musicians—Beethoven frowning, Wagner with his velvet cap, and the Apollo Belvedere. On the mantelpiece, by a frog smoking a red pipe, a paper fan on which was painted the Bayreuth Theater. On the two bookshelves were a few books—Luebke, Mommsen, Schiller, "Sans Famille," Jules Verne, Montaigne. On the walls large photographs of the Sistine Madonna, and pictures by Herkomer, edged with blue and green ribbons. There was also a view of a Swiss hotel in a frame of silver thistles; and above all, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... were more than a century older; the English could not yet, like the Italians, say what they would; the strength of English was, doubtless, there in germ, but it had still to reach its full growth and development. Even the French prose of Rabelais and Montaigne was more mature. But in Spenser, as in Hooker, all these tentative essays of vigorous but unpractised minds have led up to great and lasting works. We have forgotten all these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect, to speak ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... 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
... literature of France in the olden time when Europe furnished us with something more than anarchy, clothes, and bargain-counter titles. A sample of the Young America of that early day asked an old gentleman, "Why are you always reading that old Montaigne?" The reply was, "Why, child, there is in this book all that a gentleman needs to think about," with the discreet addition, "Not a book for little girls, though." If we find in our circle of poets a certain stateliness of style scarcely to be looked for in a somewhat ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... still more remarkable brother, known as M. de Saci, trained for the Church, and already mentioned in connection with Pascal’s conversion. He became Pascal’s spiritual director, and held with him the famous conversation on Epictetus and Montaigne. To the same group of men belonged Singlin, of whom we have heard so much in former pages, and Lancelot and Fontaine; above all, Antoine Arnauld, the youngest of the large Arnauld family, and the most indefatigable ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... scribblers 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 ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... associated himself with the real Marianne, he created a fictitious Marianne, ideal, kind, spirituelle, perhaps ignorant, but subtile and corrupted in mind, who amused and disconcerted him at one and the same time. He had left the Continental Hotel, and rented a house on Avenue Montaigne, Champs-Elysees, where he sometimes entertained Marianne as he might have done a princess. At such times she gossiped while smoking Turkish tobacco. Her Parisian grace, her champagne-like effervescent manner, seduced and charmed this serious, pale traveller, whose very smile ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... are plenty of good people, however, who would uphold him in that transaction. Indeed, do not most of us with unseemly haste and unnatural greed dispose of the effects of our deceased friends and relations? The funeral is hardly over before we begin to get ready for the auction. "I preserve," says Montaigne, "a bit of writing, a seal, a prayer-book, a particular sword, that has been used by my friends and predecessors, and have not thrown the long staves my father carried in his hand out of my closet." If the essayist lived in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... absorbed in the contemplation of saintly things, and imbibing inspiration from her "Hours," the "Lives of the Saints," or "An Introduction to a Holy Life," a book very much in vogue at that period, the child would be devouring such profane books as Montaigne, Scarron's romances and Epicurus, as more in accordance with ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... 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 things: ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his son-in-law, Philip, who this Phoeas was, and what was his nature, qualities, and manners; and as soon as Philip, amongst other things, had told him that he was "cowardly and timorous," the Emperor immediately thence concluded that he was cruel and a murderer. What is it, says Montaigne, that makes tyrants so bloody? 'Tis the solicitude for their own safety, and their faint hearts can furnish them with no other means of securing themselves, than in exterminating those who may hurt them. See his Essay entitled, ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... 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 ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Since Montaigne wrote the first Essays, this Form has permeated every country. In France, Sainte-Beuve, in North America, Emerson, has founded his School. In Germany, Hillebranat follows the lead of Sainte-Beuve, while Hermann Grimm is a disciple of Emerson. The ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... perception, an inviolable conscientiousness, a common sense frankly self-satisfied, are some of the qualifications which Mr. Purnell brings to the discussion of literature as seen in modern journalism, and in the lives of Giraldus Cambrensis and Montaigne,—of Roger Williams, the literary statesman,—of Steele, Sterne, and Swift, essayists,—of Mazzini, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... partly as a hint to my own army of correspondents,[1] I have given a fragment of the fruits of wide experience. Remember that stately Sir William Temple is all but forgotten; chatty Pepys is immortal. Windy Philip de Commines is unread; Montaigne is the delight of leisurely men all the world over. The mighty Doctor Robertson is crowned chief of bores; the despised Boswell is likely to be the delight of ages to come. The lesson is—be simple, be natural, be truthful; and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... his own temperament. The love that he bore him—for it was really love—had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself. Yes, Basil could have saved him. But it was too late now. The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. There were passions ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... 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 ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... when still some few Loved "old Montaigne," and praised Pope's Homer (Nay, thought to style him "poet" ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... library 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 ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... 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 have had a little ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... 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
... curious 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
... with difficulty, dragging itself regretfully from the superb spectacle which Paris had been awaiting for four days; it remounted the avenues, took the Rue Montaigne, and, with its slow and surly little trot, came out at the Madeleine by the Boulevard Malesherbes. Here the crowd ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... dream till the arrival of the newspaper tells me that the tea has stood long enough. After tea, if there was news from the seat of war, I called in my maids, who brought down the great atlas and studied the chances of the campaign with me. Then there was an hour or two for Montaigne, or Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Tennyson, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... would be what 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 and original in its combinations, rises into identity with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... understood at the time. The thinkers and men of science were 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
... proposition or ended anywhere in sight of it. Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, they talk of anything but the matter in hand, after mentioning it; and when you come down to the moderns, for instance, to such a modern as Montaigne, you find him wandering all over the place. He has no sooner stated his subject than he begins to talk about something else; it reminds him (like Lincoln) of a story which has nothing to do with it; and that story reminds ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... 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 and ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... dear reader, for having been unable to 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 centre of France; especially as they are the genuine expressions ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... 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, ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... Goethe say somewhere?" he asked. "That if man endures for a million years, he'll never lack obstacles to give him trouble, or the pressure of need to make him conquer them. Then there's Montaigne—you ought to read Montaigne—wisest of men. He'll tell you that human wisdom has never reached the perfection of conduct that itself prescribes; and could it arrive there, it would still dictate to itself others beyond. In a word, the world will never be short of crooks while human ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... and it pinned him down to the objective, to the field of vision under his microscope. The table of contents of Representative Men is the dial of his education. It is as follows: Uses of Great Men; Plato, or The Philosopher; Plato, New Readings; Swedenborg, or The Mystic; Montaigne, or The Sceptic; Shakespeare, or The Poet; Napoleon, or The Man of the World; Goethe, or The Writer. The predominance of the writers over all other types of men is not cited to show Emerson's interest in ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... 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 learn'd 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 ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... 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 be free who is in debt. The inevitable ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... ["Montaigne's vanity led him to talk perpetually of himself, and as often happens to vain men, he would rather talk of his own failings than of any foreign ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... occurs, but a large quantity of urine is usually passed after it and a 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 ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... 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 others, ancient ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... says Montaigne, "where they believe the souls of the happy live in all manner of liberty, in delightful fields; and there it is those souls, repeating the words we utter, which ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... 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
... general 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 of literary art, excels ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... absence 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 demand ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication to one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humor them; then conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne, that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... this period was something of a sumptuous dandy, proud of his brave looks and his fur-trimmed mantle. Life was his province. No subject was vulgar to him so long as it presented problems of light and construction and drawing. Rembrandt, like Montaigne, was never didactic. He looked at life through his eyes and through his imagination, and related his adventures. One day it was a flayed ox hanging outside a butcher's shop, which he saw through his eyes; another day it was Christ healing ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... that originating power does not go with assimilating power. Few thinkers on his level display such breadth of literary reference. Unlike Wordsworth, who was content with a few tattered volumes on a kitchen shelf, Emerson worked among books. When he was a boy he found a volume of Montaigne, and he never forgot the delight and wonder in which he lived with it. His library is described as filled with well-selected authors, with curious works from the eastern world, with many editions in both Greek and English of his favourite ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... babilone whiche standeth in chaldee was sette in a right grete playne/ & had so hyghe walles that by the heyghte of them/ was contynuell derkenes environed & obscurete/ that none erthely man might beholde and see the ende of y'e hyghnes of the walle/ And therfore ysaye callid hit y'e montaigne obscure/ And saint Iherome sayth y't the mesure of the heyght of this walle was thre thousand paas/ whiche extendeth vnto y'e lengthe of thre myle lombardes/ hit is to wete that lombarde mylis and english myles ben of one lengthe And in one of the corners of this cyte was made a toure ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... accordingly as we answer the 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 nor bad. There is no longer any ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... came to the same thing. We adjourned that autumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apartment in the street then bravely known as the Rue d'Angouleme-St.-Honore and now, after other mutations, as the Rue La Boetie; which we were again to exchange a year later for an abode in the Rue Montaigne, this last after a summer's absence at Boulogne-sur-Mer; the earlier migration setting up for me the frame of a considerably animated picture. Animated at best it was with the spirit and the modest facts of our family ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... one actually condemned was in 1712. But in this case, on the representation of the judge who tried the issue, the verdict was formally set aside. By that time people were beginning to realise the wisdom of Montaigne's counsel, written at the commencement ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... ordinary laws of human society were held to be abrogated. This wickedness, perhaps, reached its culmination in the Spanish conquest of America. Few Christians were civilised enough to condemn these purjured banditti, but Montaigne in France, and Raleigh in England, were glorious exceptions, and both of them were under ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... influence, some magnetic current must have let itself loose to 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 period in Mahometan India; so, too, in China, in Japan, and even in far away ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... said of it, it 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 lodgment in this last capacity to a single work, "The Complete and Classical ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... either to display or to philosophy. Margaret was struck with the 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 solicitations to ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... some newly devised type faces, all designed by artists of reputation. Figure 62 illustrates a fount called the "Montaigne" which has been recently completed by Mr. Bruce Rogers for the Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., and cut under his immediate direction, with especial insistance upon an unmechanical treatment of serifs, etc. As a result the ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... first part of Tristram Shandy—a strange, desultory work, in which many of the curious bits of philosophy are taken from Montaigne, Burton, Rabelais, and others; but which has, besides, great originality in the handling and in the portraiture of characters. Much of what Sterne borrowed from these writers passed for his own in that day, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... of retreat! and happy had it been for Hannibal if 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 delights above all things in a train behind, aye, and ushers, too, ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... requires age for its due appreciation. Leigh Hunt's 'Indicator' comprises some admirable essays, but the general public have not a word to say for them; it may be urged that that is because they had not read the 'Indicator' But why then do they praise the 'Rambler' and Montaigne? That comforting word, 'Mesopotamia,' which has been so often alluded to in religious matters, has many a parallel in ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... contact with the ball. Take the experience of Diogenes and Solomon at the St. Jonah's Links week before last. The Wiseman's Handicap was on. Diogenes and Simple Simon were playing just ahead of Solomon and Montaigne. Solomon was driving in great form. For the first time in his life he seemed able to keep his eye on the ball, and the way he sent it flying through the air was a caution. Diogenes and Simple Simon had both had ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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 rather ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... me. The subject is of perpetual interest, and it is treated, 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 retirement ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... man at one time can be wise and love. Amare et sapere vix deo conceditur. (Publius Syrus.) The quotation is found in both Burton and Montaigne. ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... 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 costumes, who do a sword-fight ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... by the effort to carry it out. And now, he would solve this problem of earning a living in the great city by honest means. For in the city, at least, success well deserves the compliments which those who fail bestow upon it. What Montaigne said of greatness, therefore, Khalid must have said of success. If we can not attain it, let us denounce it. And in what terms does he this, O merciful Allah! We translate a portion of the apostrophe in the K. L. MS., and not the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... orders, nor that of the comedians. He levied contributions on comic authors, on poets, orators, and philosophers; and in his impromptus they often discovered the thoughts of Seneca, Cicero, or Montaigne. He possessed the art of appropriating the remains of these great men to himself, and allying them to the simplicity of the blockhead; so that the same proposition which was admired in a serious author, became highly ridiculous in the mouth of this excellent actor." In France Harlequin was ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... in this 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 ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... very slight effort of memory has enabled me to recall their contents as readily as though the pages were open before me. I could recite you the whole of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Strada, Jornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and Bossuet. I name ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... restraint usually imposed by 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. When she died, at the age of ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... Rodolphe de Reding, landamman de Schwitz et general des Confederes, n'avait oublie aucun des avantages que lui offrit la situation des lieux. Il avait fait couper des rochers enormes, qui en s'ebranlant des qu'on retirait les faibles appuis qui les retenaient encore, se detachaient du sommet de la montaigne et se precipitaient avec un bruit affreux sur les bataillons serres des Autrichiens. Deja les chevaux s'effrayaient, les rangs se confondaient, et le desordre egarait le courage et le rendait inutile, lorsque les Suisses descendirent ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... young painter was 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
... labored a twelvemonth longer; but now, as I 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
... 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 rid of the present evil is not cure, unless there ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... with all this against him he should have been from the first a great moral and literary influence and the delight of the wisest and soundest minds the world has seen. Shakespeare read him, and Jonson; Montaigne, a greater than himself, is in some sort his descendant; Swift, in Coleridge's enlightening phrase, is 'anima Rabelaesii habitans in sicco'; to Sterne and Balzac and Moliere he was a constant inspiration; unto this day his work is studied and his meanings are ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... use of others, may be mentioned the churches built by dwarfs in Scotland and Brittany, and described by Mr. MacRitchie, as also the two following instances, taken from widely distant parts of the globe. In Brittany, the dolmen of Manne-er Hrock (Montaigne de la Fee), at Locmariaquer, is said to have been built by a fairy, in order that a mother might stand upon it and look out for her son's ship.[A] In Fiji the following tale is told about the Nanga or sacred stone enclosure:—"This is the word of our fathers concerning the ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... the nation by his introduction of learned words, merely because they were learned. It would be difficult to describe Brown adequately; exuberant in conception and conceit, dignified, hyperlatinistic, a quiet and sublime enthusiast; yet a fantast, a humourist, a brain with a twist; egotistic like Montaigne, yet with a feeling heart and an active curiosity, which, however, too often degenerates into a hunting after oddities. In his 'Hydriotaphia' and, indeed, almost all his works the entireness of his mental action is very observable; ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... 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 ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... G. Melinaud Menjago Mercier Metchnikoff Meteyard Meyners, d'Estrez Michelet Miklucho-Macleay Minovici Mirabeau Mitchell, H.W. Mitford Modigliani Moliere Moll Mondiere Mongeri Montague, Lady M.W. Montaigne Montmorand Moraglia Morris, R.T. Morselli Mortimer, G. Moryson, Fynes Moses, Julius Mueller, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Montaigne thinks it a reflection upon human nature itself that few people take delight in seeing beasts caress and play together, while almost every one is pleased to see them lacerate and ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... with 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 ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... and France claim the honor of having produced the first modern philosopher, presenting Nicolas of Cusa, Bacon of Verulam, and Rene Descartes as their candidates, while Hobbes, Bruno, and Montaigne have received only scattered votes. The claim of England is the weakest of all, for, without intending to diminish Bacon's importance, it may be said that the programme which he develops—and in essence his philosophy is nothing more—was, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... 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 news ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hand, of course, there are companionable, sympathetic writers whose whole stock-in-trade is themselves, their personal charm, their personal way of looking at things. Of these, Montaigne and Charles Lamb are among the great examples. It matters to us little or nothing what they are writing about; for their subjects, so far as they are concerned, are only important in relation to themselves, as revealing to us ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... one of his essays, tells us how he "played the sedulous ape" to Hazlitt, Sir Thomas Browne, Montaigne, and other writers of the past. And the compositors of all our higher-toned newspapers keep the foregoing sentence set up in type always, so constantly does it come tripping off the pens of all higher-toned reviewers. Nor ever do I read it without a fresh thrill ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... their misery. But that alleviation was wanting in the case of Tasso. He was sane and conscious, and his sanity intensified the horror of his situation, "enabling him to gauge with fearful accuracy the depths of the abyss into which he had fallen." One glimpse of him is given to us by Montaigne, who visited the cell, where it seems the unfortunate inmate was made a show of to all whom curiosity or pity attracted to the hospital. "I had even more indignation than compassion when I saw him at Ferrara in so piteous a state—a living shadow of himself." His jailer ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... towards Westminster, but seeing by the coaches the House to be up, I stopped at the 'Change (where, I met Mrs. Turner, and did give her a pair of gloves), and there bought several things for my wife, and so to my bookseller's, and there looked for Montaigne's Essays, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... 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 ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... by Sir W. Pellis, which is referred traditionally to Raleigh and Montaigne (see Book I. chap. xxxiv.) An Office of Address whereby the wants of all may be made known to ALL (that painful and great instrument of this design), where men may know what is already done in the business of learning, what is at present in doing, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... 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 ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh |
