"Montaigne" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worthies recline, and converse. I list to St. Paul who argues the doubts of Montaigne; Julian the Apostate cross-questions Augustine; and Thomas-a-Kempis unrolls his old black letters for all to decipher. Zeno murmurs maxims beneath the hoarse shout of Democritus; and though Democritus laugh loud and long, and the sneer of Pyrrho be seen; yet, divine ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... what seemed to Lydia's fatigued languor really miraculous speed. "It's true that she watches your social advance with the calm disinterestedness of a cat watching somebody pour cream out of a jug. She wants her saucerful. But look here. Did I ever tell you about the man Montaigne speaks of who spent all his life to acquire the skill necessary to throw a grain of millet through the eye of a needle? Well, that man was proud of it, but poor Marietta's haunted by doubts as to whether in her case ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... changes of mood, it happened a little time ago, when the play was roughly written, but on its present lines, that I took up a volume of Montaigne, and found in it his justification by ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... of these were—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Necker, Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Mungo Park, Lord Chatham, William Pitt. These articles, on the whole judiciously omitted from the author's ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... in prose, in the earlier eighteenth century, were an innovation provoking spirited opposition in Italy. The line of translators, imitators, and enthusiasts in France is as numerous as that of other countries. The list of great authors inspired by Horace includes such names as Montaigne, "The French Horace," Malherbe, Regnier, Boileau, La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Le Brun, Andre ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... 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, and ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... Brome, complimented the author by copies 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 ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... 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
... An ugly name, isn't it? But to me it is very beautiful. The house has orchards all round it, and yellow roses with flushed centers poke themselves in my window, and there is a little tower like Montaigne's." ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... singing-robe view of literature, who appreciate the distinction which literary cultivation gives them over the herd of mankind, but who by no means take that distinction too seriously. Aristophanes, Horace, Lucian, Rabelais, Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, these are all Peacock's literary ancestors, each, of course, with his own difference in especial and in addition. Aristophanes was more of a politician and a patriot, Lucian more of a freethinker, Horace more of a simple pococurante. Rabelais may have had a little inclination ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... before dinner with my pleasant old companion, Montaigne. Mr. Magee, have you ever read his essay ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... hold on the attention and regard of his countrymen. The debate, before his place in literature is settled, must rather turn on other points: as whether the genial essayist and egoist or the romantic inventor and narrator was the stronger in him—whether the Montaigne and Pepys elements prevailed in his literary composition or the Scott and Dumas elements—a question indeed which among those who care for him most has always been at issue. Or again, what degree of true inspiring and illuminating ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... constantly experience of their power, from this I comprehend that they exist, and I venerate them." (xii. 28, and the note. Comp. Aristotle de Mundo, c. 6; Xen. Mem. i. 4, 9; Cicero, Tuscul. i. 28, 29; St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, i. 19, 20; and Montaigne's Apology for Raimond de Sebonde, ii. c. 12.) This is a very old argument, which has always had great weight with most people, and has appeared sufficient. It does not acquire the least additional strength by being developed ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... in 1582, aged seventy-six) had written in earlier life four Latin tragedies, when Professor of Humanities at Bordeaux, with Montaigne in ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... it. I have come, if possible, to explain myself. To understand is always to forgive. That is a great saying of Montaigne's. If I could ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... 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
... be a substance that thinks and reads," she says, finding her good uncle a trifle dull for a compagnon de voyage. Her tastes were catholic. She read Astree with delight, loved Petrarch, Ariosto, and Montaigne; Rabelais made her "die of laughter," she found Plutarch admirable, enjoyed Tacitus as keenly as did Mme. Roland a century later, read Josephus and Lucian, dipped into the history of the crusades and of the iconoclasts, of ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... Abbot Samson, in 1159, Scotti habitum induens, (which must have shown his massive calves to great advantage.) probably see much the same popular characteristics that Hawthorne saw seven hundred years later? Shall a man try to be entertaining after Montaigne, aesthetic after Winckelmann, wise after Goethe, or trenchant after Forsyth? Can he hope to bring back anything so useful as the fork, which honest Tom Coryate made prize of two centuries and a half ago, and put into the greasy fingers of Northern barbarians? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... 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 ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... 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 ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... Goethe's or Emerson's, an expression of intuition and faith. Properly, the literary essay is a distinct artistic genre—the expression of a concrete thinking personality, and its value consists in the living wisdom it contains. Such essays as those of a Montaigne or a La Rochefoucauld make excellent materials for the social sciences, and can never be displaced by them as sources ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... 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 ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Pagan ideal sometimes smote and fired him, the Christian never. He could still read his Plato and his Cicero, whereas gulfs of unfathomable distaste rolled between him and the New Testament. Perhaps the author of all authors for whom he had most relish was Montaigne. He would have taken him down to-night had there been nothing more kindling ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an authority is here for the credit 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, ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... but there is so much less behind; and I am of the temper of most 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 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 Tale, The Cock and the Fox,[10] which I have translated, and some others, I ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... 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 ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... lassitude. ils s'en tiennent a une autre 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, ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... working people would more than any other measure serve to raise them as a class, and this, not by pulling down others, but by levelling them up to a higher and still advancing standard of religion, intelligence, and virtue. "All moral philosophy," says Montaigne, "is as applicable to a common and private life as to the most splendid. Every man carries the entire form of ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... letters. A shrewd French writer has remarked, that a clever man in a foreign country should always know two things,—what he is, and where he is. Mr. Russell seems habitually to have forgotten both. Even Montaigne, the most garrulous of writers, becomes discreet in speaking of other people. If we learn from him that the Duke of Florence mixed a great deal of water with his wine and the Duchess hardly any at all. we learn it, without any connivance of his, from his diary, and that a hundred and fifty years ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... 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 Le ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... Conversation Shakespeare speaks of Montaigne's Essays. These were first published in 1580 and successive editions were issued in the years following, the third volume being published in 1588. "In England Montaigne was early popular. It was long supposed that ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... 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 infinitely ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... 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 the Mesnagerie) that we remember ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... 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 ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... 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 Preceptor for ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... found interest in listening to some of the speakers, and in looking at some of the members. Montaigne pointed out all of the notables. One of the speakers* was a short man, with a corpulent body and a large open face; but he was a born orator of a certain type. Rounded and polished, mellow and musical, his sentences ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... or invariable law of intellectual development; but must be ascribed to other causes, chiefly of a moral and practical kind, which exert a powerful influence, for good or evil, on every human mind. Montaigne speaks of an error maintained by Plato, "that children and old people were most susceptible of Religion, as if it sprung and derived its credit from our weakness."[83] And we find M. Comte himself complaining, somewhat bitterly, that his quondam ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... whole 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
... book. But it is much better as pure reading matter than as advice to the young idea or even the middle-aged idea. It may have been all right for Stevenson to "play the sedulous ape" and consciously imitate the style of Hazlitt, Lamb, Montaigne and the rest, but if the rest of us were to try it there would result a terrible plague of insufferably artificial and affected authors, all playing the sedulous ape and all ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... in the Dordogne, the Monarchist candidate for the Chamber, M. Thirion Montauban, received 6,708 votes, against 6,439 given to his Republican competitor. I took a special interest in this election, because M. Thirion-Montauban is the present proprietor of the house of Michel de Montaigne, which came into his possession through his marriage with the daughter of M. Magne, the eminent Finance Minister of Napoleon III. I made a visit there late in the summer, and found him busy with his canvass, on lines of respect ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... says:—'For who could imagine that Dr. Clarke valued himself for his agility, and frequently amused himself in a private room of his house in leaping over the tables and chairs.' Warton's Essay on Pope, ii. 125. 'It is a good remark of Montaigne's,' wrote Goldsmith, 'that the wisest men often have friends with whom they do not care how much they play the fool.' Forster's Goldsmith, i. 166. Mr. Seward says in his Anecdotes, ii. 320, that 'in the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... 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? ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... many 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, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... small and weak; and the load served to emphasize Bess in divers ways. When not waiting upon the invalid Mother Marklin, Bess broke into her father's bookshelves, and read the owlish authors such as Bacon and Dr. Johnson, with side-flights into Montaigne, Voltaire, Amiel, and others of hectic kidney. She discovered, moreover, a sympathy with those women of strong minds who have a quarrel with Providence for that they were not made men. Bess believed in the equality of the sexes, without pausing to ask in what they were ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... 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
... 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 ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... hypnotic trance; but it is well known that persons may easily train themselves to hold out the arms for any length of time without increasing the respiration by one breath or raising the pulse rate at all. We all remember Montaigne's famous illustration in which he said that if a woman began by carrying a calf about every day she would still be able to carry it ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... Fables of AEsop,"—thus says Montaigne in his charming essay "Of Books"(7)—"have several senses and meanings, of which the Mythologists choose some one that tallies with the fable. But for the most part 't is only what presents itself at the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al |
