Author
French · 1533-1592 · 14 quotes
French · 1533–1592
14 quotes in our collection
Michel de Montaigne was the French essayist who, in the 1570s and 1580s, invented the personal essay — the form in which a private individual, using only their own experience and reading as material, attempts to think honestly about what it means to be human. Born in 1533 in Périgord, the son of a minor nobleman, he studied law, served in the Bordeaux parlement, and retired at thirty-eight to his tower library to write. The Essays grew across three editions from brief observations to extended explorations of consciousness, memory, education, death, and the self. Montaigne wrote I — the first person singular as a philosophical position — at a time when humility demanded the general and the abstract. We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater power to possess it; experience is not enough — it must be weighed, ordered, and digested. He died in 1592 at fifty-nine, revising his Essays to the end.
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