"Montaigne" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perpetually on the move. His agility occasionally seems a little feverish. We feel some anxiety; we are afraid that the sentence may not find its balance. A few lines from his works can be recognized at a glance, for he has only had clumsy imitators, his style being, moreover, in the language of Montaigne, of one substance with the author, being the author himself. And yet one could hardly say that this style breaks with tradition. He stops short just at the point at which his idiosyncrasies would degenerate ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... of this 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 ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... how to compose your manners? You have done a great deal more than he who has composed books. Have you known how to take repose? You have done more than he who has taken cities and empires.—MONTAIGNE. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... y alt, tout s'enveloppe sous le nom de salade; de mesme, sous la consideration des noms, je m'en voys faire icy une galimafree de divers articles." (Montaigne, Essais, i. 46.) ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... 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 mind that the same automobile had passed them once ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... is taken, you see, from nature. It is a good remark of Montaigne's, that the wisest men often hare friends with whom they do not care how much they play the fool. Take my present follies as instances of my regard. Poetry is a much easier and more agreeable species of composition than prose; and could a man live by it, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... several of Plutarch's "Lives", and the works of Lucian. In Latin, Lucretius, Pliny's "Letters", the "Annals" and "Germany" of Tacitus. In French, the "History of the French Revolution" by Lacretelle. He read for the first time, this year, Montaigne's "Essays", and regarded them ever after as one of the most delightful and instructive books in the world. The list is scanty in English works: Locke's "Essay", "Political Justice", and Coleridge's "Lay Sermon", form nearly the whole. It was his frequent habit to read aloud to me in the evening; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... all appearance, is the account of the observations made by M. Montaigne, as presented to the Academy of Sciences at Paris by M. Baudouin in 1761. The transit of Venus which was to take place on June 6 in that year led to some inquiry as to the satellite supposed to have been seen by Cassini and Short, for of course a transit would be a favourable occasion for ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... fair degree of shrewd 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, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... 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 these days, and followed the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Now there is a beauty of parts, which is external; and another of the expression of the soul, which is the superior. But in its higher grades the former implies the latter. Socrates said that his ugliness accused just as much in his soul, had he not corrected it by education. And Montaigne writes: "The same word in Greek signifies both fair and good, and Holy Word often calls those good which it would call fair"; and, moreover, "Not only in the men that serve me, but also in the beasts, I consider this point within two finger-breadths ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... than we have, thought highly of it. So he did himself; but so it was his nature to think of most of his own performances; and such an estimate is common to other authors besides Cicero, though few announce it so openly. Montaigne takes him to task for this, with more wit, perhaps, than fairness. "It is no great fault to write poor verses; but it is a fault not to be able to see how unworthy such poor verses were of his reputation". Voltaire, ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... if these conditions did not follow the subject was in a hypnotic trance; but it is well known that persons may easily train themselves to hold out the arms for any length of time without increasing the respiration by one breath or raising the pulse rate at all. We all remember Montaigne's famous illustration in which he said that if a woman began by carrying a calf about every day she would still be able to carry it when it ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... to the Military College at Woolwich, played him a trick, apparently between jest and earnest, which amused us exceedingly. He was to be flogged; and the dreadful door of the library was approached. (They did not invest the books with flowers, as Montaigne recommends.) Down falls the criminal, and, twisting himself about the master's legs, which he does the more when the other attempts to move, repeats without ceasing, "Oh, good God! consider my father, sir; my father, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... 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 the autograph of Shakespeare in a copy of Florio's translation ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... prolonged sorrow necessarily light: "Quod autem magnum dolorem brevem longinquum levem esse dicitis, id non intelligo quale sit, video enim et magnos et eosdem bene longinquos dolores." But the sentiment is adopted by Montaigne (1. xiv.), ed. 1580, p. 66: "Tu ne la sentiras guiere long temps, si tu la sens trop; elle mettra fin a soy ou a toy; l'un et l'autre revient a un." ("Si tu ne la portes; elle t'emportera," note.) And again by Sir Thomas Brown, "Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... 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 chapter out ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 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 ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... of the heavens was developed more and more; the physical sciences were more and more cultivated; the new scientific atmosphere in general more and more prevailed; and at the end of the seventeenth century this vast growth of superstition began to wither and droop. Montaigne, Bayle, and Voltaire in France, Thomasius in Germany, Calef in New England, and Beccaria in Italy, did much also to create an intellectual and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Montaigne, in his curious Essay, entitled "Des Destriers," says that all the world knows everything about Bucephalus. The name of the favourite charger of the Cid Ruy Diaz, is scarcely less celebrated. Notice is taken of him in almost every one of the hundred ballads concerning ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... circumstance necessary to the state of innocence, wherein a man's happiness was not to depend upon the caprice of another. It was not till after he had made a faux pas, that he had his female mate. Many such transformations of individuals have been well attested; particularly one by Montaigne, and another by the late Bishop of Salisbury. From all which it appears, that this system of male and female has already undergone and may hereafter suffer, several alterations. Every smatterer in anatomy knows, that a woman is but an introverted man; a new fusion and flatus ...
— The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers • Jonathan Swift
... pictures, which was held in the Avenue Montaigne, M. Ernest Chesneau, a critic very sympathetic to English art, tells us, in his admirable book on the "English School of Painting," that "for the French it was a revelation of a style and a school of the very existence of which they had hitherto had no idea; and ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... 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 ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... with 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 complete ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... 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, ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... characteristics of Elia, one essentially an essayist, and of the true family of Montaigne, "never judging," as he says, "system-wise of things, but fastening on particulars;" saying all things as it were on chance occasion only, and by way of pastime, yet succeeding thus, "glimpse-wise," ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the Heights (Auerbach), Eugenie Grandet (Balzac), Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), Emerson's Essays, Boswell's Life of Johnson, History of the English People (Green), Outlines of Universal History, Origin of Species, Montaigne's Essays, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Whittier, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... that the child had imagined; but Rembrandt at 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 ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... 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, ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished elements in a 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 his ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in which he discusses with uncommon depth and subtlety, but in language of exquisite clearness and force, some of the highest problems in philosophy and morals, and dissects the maxims and theories of such men as Montaigne, Voltaire, Rochefoucauld, Jouffroy, Cousin, Quinet, and Lamartine. His fine genius for philosophical speculation, in connection with his strong, common sense, and his unwavering faith in the Gospel are here strikingly developed." Among the subjects treated ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... to whom we are willing to listen as oracles, I do not want to see everybody who is not a "professional" silenced or snubbed, if he ventures into any field of knowledge which he has not made especially his own. I like to read Montaigne's remarks about doctors, though he never took a medical degree. I can even enjoy the truth in the sharp satire of Voltaire on the medical profession. I frequently prefer the remarks I hear from the pew after the sermon ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... intime, that intensely modern sort of poetry in which the writer has for his aim the portraiture of his own most intimate moods, and to take the reader into his confidence. That generation had other instances of this intimacy of sentiment: Montaigne's Essays are full of it, the carvings of the church of Brou are full of it. M. Sainte-Beuve has perhaps exaggerated the influence of this quality in Du Bellay's Regrets; but the very name of the book has a touch of Rousseau ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... minuteness or prolixity of these personal memorials. The lives of the younger Pliny, of Petrarch, and of Erasmus, are expressed in the epistles, which they themselves have given to the world. The essays of Montaigne and Sir William Temple bring us home to the houses and bosoms of the authors: we smile without contempt at the headstrong passions of Benevenuto Cellini, and the gay follies of Colley Cibber. The confessions of St. Austin and Rousseau disclose the secrets of the human heart; the ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... illustrate this double-facedness of the Renaissance by Montaigne (second half of sixteenth century). His Essays make for rationalism, but contain frequent professions of orthodox Catholicism, in which he was perfectly sincere. There is no attempt to reconcile the two points of view; in fact, he takes the sceptical position ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... 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
... 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 ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Montaigne said long ago: "Were I not to follow the straight road for its straightness, I should follow it for having found by experience that in the end it is commonly the happiest and most useful track." The doctrine of ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... questionable moralist in practice. Why, then, necessarily conclude that a moralist is a moral man, or a sarcastic satirist a deceitful one, or the man who describes scenes of blood and carnage a monster of cruelty? Does not Montaigne say of authors that they must be judged by their merits, and not by their morals, nor by that show of works which they exhibit to the world? Why, then, does M. Lamartine appreciate Byron according to his satirical ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... other; But howsoe'er they make a 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; And offer'd to lay wagers that As Montaigne, playing with his cat, Complains she thought him but an ass, Much more she wou'd Sir Hudibras: For that's 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 shy of using ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... 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
... 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
... English history. A witch was burned later than the date of this trial, and the last 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 of the ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... 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. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Mountain, which is a very old Norman family, and therefore of French extraction, originally wrote their name "de Montaigne," from the name of their estates at Perigord, near Bordeaux, and as stated in the life of one of its members, the well-known Michael Seigneur de Montaigne, the essayist and philosopher, "This race was ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... 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 e'en the specks of character pourtray'd: We see the Rambler with fastidious smile Mark the lone tree, and note the heath-clad isle; But when th' heroick tale of Flora's[786] ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... longer of posthumous notoriety. The egotism of Pepys was but a suppressed garrulity, which habitual caution, fostered by a period of political confusion and the mystery of office, drove inward to a kind of soliloquy in cipher; that of Montaigne was metaphysical,—in studying his own nature and noting his observations he was studying man, and that with a singular insouciance of public opinion; but Haydon appears to have written his journals with a deliberate intention of their some day advertising himself, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... 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? ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Phillip, which are now known as Point Lonsdale and Point Nepean. If they saw the entrance on March 30, why did they lose the opportunity of honouring two more of their distinguished countrymen, as they had done in naming Cap Richelieu (Schanck), Cap Desaix (Otway), Cap Montaigne (Nelson), Cap Volney (Moonlight Head), and so many other features of the coast? It is singular that while they named some capes that do not exist—as, for instance, Cap Montesquieu, to which there is no name on modern maps to correspond, and no projection from the coast to which ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... 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
... 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 ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... new developments of Shakspere-study that so little attention has been given among us to a question which, once raised, has a very peculiar literary and psychological attraction of its own—the subject, namely, of the influence which the plays show their author to have undergone from the Essays of Montaigne. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... time; and therefore it is sought in abstracts and epitomes, which afford meagre food to the intellect, though they take away the uneasy sense of inanition. Tout abrege sur un bon livre est un sot abrege, says Montaigne; and of all abridgments there are none by which a reader is liable, and so likely, to be deceived as by ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... when Joseph first assumed a military rank, he passed nearly four months with the army of England on the coast or in Brabant. On his return, all his visitors were gone, except a young poet of the name of Montaigne, who does not want genius, but who is rather too fond of the bottle. Joseph is considered the best gourmet or connoisseur in liquors and wines of this capital, and Montaigne found his Champagne and burgundy so excellent that he never once went to bed that he was not heartily ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... value, earlier in date, stands Seneca, who, like Plutarch, is a lively thinker and a deft essayist, with the same love for a quotation and the same wide interests, but assuredly not a considerable enlarger of the field of human thought. To those who know Montaigne, the best notion of Seneca and Plutarch will be formed by remembering that his essays are admitted by himself to be "wholly compiled of what I have borrowed from them." The elder Pliny supplies us with extracts and summaries of the knowledge or the notions then extant, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... 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 ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the daughter is essentially a woman's question. The bride, or at least her mother for her, ought to consider that, though every family quiver varies in capacity with the income, her own lot may be to have a quiver full. Heaven forbid, as Montaigne said, that we should interfere with the feminine methods, but common prudence seems to dictate the duty of this forecast. Let, therefore, the demand for endowment come from the bride's mother. All that she would be justified in asking of ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... Dr. Rawley, late in life, he had discovered, as far back as his Cambridge days, the "unfruitfulness" of Aristotle's method. It is easy to make too much of this. It is not uncommon for undergraduates to criticise their text-books; it was the fashion with clever men, as, for instance, Montaigne, to talk against Aristotle without knowing anything about him; it is not uncommon for men who have worked out a great idea to find traces of it, on precarious grounds, in their boyish thinking. Still, it is worth noting ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... Montaigne published the first great sceptical work in the French language. The vast mass of authority which those writers loved to array, and by which they shaped the whole course of their reasoning, is calmly and unhesitatingly discarded. The passion for the miraculous, the absorbing ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... as well as in some previously quoted, the cynicism of both Hobbes and Montaigne seems to speak. Man is really a fool, and society rests upon force. The further down we go, we come, not to any natural rights, or essential principles of justice, which reason is capable of judging, but only to a mass of customs built up out of selfish ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... he 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," ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... Langham, with the usual reaction of his afternoon self against his morning self, felt that wild horses should not take him to Church again, and, with a longing for something purely mundane, he stayed at home with a volume of Montaigne, while apparently all the rest of the household ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... suitable for either 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
... the figure of a gentle friend playing in some garden with a child whose manners are new and pleasing to him, but of whose great destiny he makes no guess. That child was to be Du Bellay, Brantome, Montaigne a hundred-sided, huge Rabelais, Ronsard. Or perhaps this metaphor will put it better. To say that Charles of Orleans's equal and persistent music was like a string harped on distinctly in a chorus of flutes and hautboys, till one by one harps from here and there caught ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... pictures, several of which are reproduced in this book. His "Erasmus Reading to the Young Charles V." is in the Luxembourg, and the Brussels museum has his "Dante at Ravenna," and the "Entry of Albert and Isabella into Ostend." Besides these he produced "The Mass of Adrien Willaert," "The Childhood of Montaigne," "Shakespeare and his Family," "Vesalius," "Hamlet," and "Murillo in his Studio." One of his paintings, entitled "The Women of Siena, 1553," shows the women of that city working on the fortifications intended to resist the besieging army of Charles ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... 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. ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... 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 ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... 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 things: "What I desire ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... all the great authors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French and English (and I know no other languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew." One is astonished to find that he was contemptuous of Montaigne. "What signifies what a man thought," he wrote, "who never thought of anything but himself, and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?" This sentence might have served as a condemnation of Walpole himself, and indeed he meant ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... to the Virginia expedition of Somers in 1609. From these Shakespeare drew for many details. His island, however, is clearly not Bermuda, nor, indeed, any known land. Other details have been traced from various sources. Ariel is a name of a spirit in mediaeval literature of cabalistic secrets. Montaigne's Essays, translated by Florio (1603), furnished the hint of Gonzalo's imaginary commonwealth (II, i, 147 ff.). Setebos has been found as a devil-god of the Patagonians in Eden's History of Travaile (1577). ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... translating one kind into action while holding the other kind in check. The earthward and the heavenward are in each of us, striving for mastery; but no imagination is vainer than that we can indulge both, or practise the impartiality with which Montaigne's singular devotee lighted one candle {152} to St. George and another to the dragon. If we would realise the type of perfect in the mind, we must not gratify "the penchant for revolt," but ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... 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 ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... literature. All the valuable books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe would hardly have filled a single shelf, England did not yet possess Shakspeare's plays and the Fairy Queen, nor France Montaigne's Essays, nor Spain Don Quixote. In looking round a well-furnished library, how many English or French books can we find which were extant when Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth received their education? Chaucer, Gower, Froissart, Commines, Rabelais, nearly complete the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Harvard University, for the translation of Marcus Aurelius, and for the translation and selections from the Greek tragic writers. I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. DANIEL W. WILDER, of Kansas, for the quotations from Pilpay, with contributions from Diogenes Laertius, Montaigne, Burton, and Pope's Homer; to Dr. WILLIAM J. ROLFE for quotations from Robert Browning; to Mr. JAMES W. MCINTYRE for quotations from Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Mrs. Browning, Robert Browning, and Tennyson. And I have incurred other obligations ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... garden on a summer afternoon. Essays written after this fashion are racy of the soil in which they grow, as you taste the larva in the vines grown on the slopes of Etna, they say. There is a healthy Gascon flavour in Montaigne's Essays; and Charles Lamb's are scented with the primroses ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... to the printer, is certain; for an acquaintance of Shakspeare's, Resolute John Florio, distinctly shows that it was the case. We have this pithy brief Preface to the second edition of his translation of Montaigne: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... much magnanimity, by going off in a pique at his coldness, to let him lose forever the chance of making so capital an acquaintance as myself. Besides, I saw it in his eye, that the man had been a reader of good books; I would have staked my life on it, that he seized the right meaning of Montaigne. I saw that he was an earnest thinker; I more than suspected that he had been bolted in the mill of adversity. For all these things, my heart yearned toward him; ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... 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 Marquise de Chatelet have written equally as well as M. Rouille? Would Mme. de Lambert ...
— The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women • Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet
... instance in which a man amputated his genitals and recovered without subsequent symptoms. Gockelius speaks of self-castration in a ruptured man, and Golding, Guyon, Louis, Laugier, the Ephemerides, Alix, Marstral, and others, record instances of self-castration. In his Essays Montaigne mentions an instance of complete castration performed by the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Sakonboota, whose tail grows so long in the breeding season that his little wings can hardly lift it above the ground, and he flutters about in the breeze like a badly made kite. Riding back at sunset over the flat I felt like Montaigne when he desired to wear away his life in the saddle. The difference is that in the end I may have to eat my own horse. The shells from four guns kept singing their evening hymn above my head as ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... 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
... letter, has sunk like lead beneath the dark waters of oblivion; indeed, even the single signature as yet discovered unconnected with business documents—namely, the 'Willme Shakspere' on the volume of Montaigne—is not preceded by any remark whatever, by any sentence that might give a faint echo of Hamlet. Now this, to say the least, is singular to the very last degree. The unsurpassed brilliancy of the writer throws not one single spark to make ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... endeavour, of disappointed hope. Even now there was a disappointment. His poems did not find a publisher: what publisher can take the risk of adding another volume of poetry to the enormous stock of verse brought out at the author's expense? This did not sour or sadden him: he took Montaigne's advice, 'not to make too much marvel of our own fortunes.' His biographer, hearing in the winter of 1893 that Murray's illness was now considered hopeless, though its rapid close was not expected, began, with Professor Meiklejohn, to make arrangements for the publication ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... its author whispers through My Confidences. Like Montaigne's Essays, the book is one of entire good faith, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... Marie, A. Marie, P. Marro Marsh Marshall, F. Marston Martial Martineau Mason, Otis Matignon Maudsley Mayr, 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 ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... birth, Sir Thomas More published his "Utopia" to the world. Bacon intended to do the same thing in the "New Atlantis," but never completed the work, while Sir Philip Sidney gives us his dream in his "Arcadia." Montaigne makes a similar essay, and we quote from Florio's translation, published in 1603, the following passage (Montaigne's ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... of representation in children authorities are contradictory. Montaigne says that all children lie ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... 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 Carlyle. While the genius of that great writer is indisputable, I ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... 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
... our house is from later, from the time of Henri Quatre. Poissac is not far from Tours. An ugly name, isn't it? But to me it is very beautiful. The house has orchards all round it, and yellow roses with flushed centers poke themselves in my window, and there is a little tower like Montaigne's." ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... Montaigne has said of true philosophers, that "if they were great in science, they were yet much greater in action;... and whenever they have been put upon the proof, they have been seen to fly to so high a pitch, as made it very well ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... suggest; fourth, last and lowest, what we have learned in books or with masters. The virtue of an aphorism comes under the third of these heads: it conveys a portion of a truth with such point as to set us thinking on what remains. Montaigne, who delighted in Plutarch, and kept him ever on his table, praises him in that besides his long discourses, "there are a thousand others, which he has only touched and glanced upon, where he only points with his finger to direct us which way we may ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... divided into almost equal troops. The age of Philip II. was also the age of William of Orange and his four brethren, of Sainte Aldegonde, of Olden-Barneveldt, of Duplessis-Mornay, La Noue, Coligny, of Luther, Melancthon, and Calvin, Walsingham, Sidney, Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth, of Michael Montaigne, and William Shakspeare. It was not an age of blindness, but of glorious light. If the man whom the Maker of the Universe had permitted to be born to such boundless functions, chose to put out his own eyes that he might grope along his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Having done there, I away 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 |
