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To grow and to languish
“It is possible that in those who employ their time well, knowledge and experience grow with living; but vivacity, quickness, firmness, and other qualities much more our own, more important and essential, wither and languish.” I.57 (p. 289)
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Thousands of mind that trample us underfoot
“It anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot. … No particular quality will make a man proud who balances it against the many weaknesses and…
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Vice of special knowledge
“… for a man may have some special knowledge and experience of the nature of a river or a fountain, who in other matters knows only what everybody knows. However, to circulate this little scrap of knowledge, he will undertake to write the whole of physics. From this vice spring many great abuses.” I.31 “Of…
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Present knowledge
“We are, I believe, learned only with present knowledge, not with past, any more than with future.” I.25 “Of pedantry” (p.121)
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Education is not regurgitation
“Let him be asked for an account not merely of the words of his lesson, but of its sense and substance, and let him judge the profit he has made by the testimony not of his memory, but of his life. Let him be made to show what he has just learned in a hundred…
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Change us for the better
“Now it is not enough for our education not to spoil us; it must change us for the better.” I.25 “Of pedantry” (p. 124)
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Learning and indigestion
“It is a sign of rawness and indigestion to disgorge food just as we swallowed it. The stomach has not done its work if it has not changed the condition and form of what has been given to cook.” I.26 “Of the education of children (p. 134) [Montaigne is specifically speaking about learning and the…
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The world as our mirror
“This great world, which some multiply further as being only a species under one genus, is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle. In short, I want it to be the book of my student.” I.26 “Of the education of children” (p. 141)