My Blog

Category: Montaigne

  • Grotesques and monstrous bodies

    “And what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental?” I.28 “Of friendship” (p. 164)

  • Disdaining what we do not comprehend

    “It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine understanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are…

  • Facility in belief = simplicity and ignorance

    “Perhaps it is not without reason that we attribute facility in belief and conviction to simplicity and ignorance. … The more a mind is empty and without counterpoise, the more easily it gives beneath the weight of the first persuasive argument. … But then, on the other hand, it is foolish presumption to go around…

  • Chasing after fine words

    “There are some men so stupid that they go a mile out of their way to chase after a fine word, or who do not fit words to things, but seek irrelevant things which their words may fit [Quintilian]. And as another says, There are some who are led by the charm of some attractive…

  • Men who live only in the memory of books

    “In this association with men I mean to include, and foremost, those who live only in the memory of books.” I.26 “Of the education of children” (p. 139) [In other words, textual immortality. When we read, these people come alive again. We resurrect them.]

  • Too ill-instructed to instruct others

    “These are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed. I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me. I have no authority to be believed, nor do I want it, feeling myself too…

  • Speaking the minds of others

    “I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.” I.26 “Of the education of children” (p.131) “Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later. … The bees plunder the flowers here…

  • Some other tags

    This is a post to hold some other tags that will be useful later.

  • Groping, staggering, stumbling, and blundering

    “As for the natural faculties that are in me, of which this book is the essay, I feel them bending under the load. My conceptions and my judgment move only by groping, staggering, stumbling, and blundering, and when I have gone ahead as far as I can, still I am not at all satisfied: I…

  • We drink customs with our milk

    “But the principal effect of the power of custom is to seize and ensnare us in such a way that it is hardly within our power to get ourselves back out of its grip and return into ourselves to reflect and reason about its ordinances. In truth, because we drink them with our milk from…