Happy Birthday, Michel de Montaigne

Unknown, Portrait de Montaigne au Chapeau, 1820

If we call prodigies or miracles whatever our reason cannot reach, how many of these appear continually before our eyes! Let us consider through what clouds and how gropingly we are led to the knowledge of most of the things that are right in our hands; assuredly we shall find that it is rather familiarity than knowledge that takes away their strangeness.  Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself.

Michel de Montaigne, born on this day in 1533, from Essays, Book 1, chapter 23 

Les chapeaux, c'est important, les enfants.

Happy Birthday, Montaigne

Unknown, Michel de Montaigne, 1819

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.

Michel de Montaigne, born on this day in 1533

Happy Birthday, Montaigne

Unknown, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1813

Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and make it part of himself, judging the boy's progress by what Plato taught about education. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given.

Michel de Montaigne, born on this day in 1533

Familiarity.

Unknown, Portrait de Montaigne au Chapeau, 1820

If we call prodigies or miracles whatever our reason cannot reach, how many of these appear continually before our eyes! Let us consider through what clouds and how gropingly we are led to the knowledge of most of the things that are right in our hands; assuredly we shall find that it is rather familiarity than knowledge that takes away their strangeness.

Michel do Montaigne, born on this day in 1533

Happy Birthday, Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne was born on this day in 1533.

There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

Michel de Montaigne,

Greatest.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

Michel de Montaigne

Oneself.

The greatest gift in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

Michel de Montaigne

Happy Birthday, Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne was born on this day in 1533.

It is an absolute perfection, a perfection like that of the gods, to be able faithfully to enjoy one’s own nature.  We search for other conditions because we do not understand how to deal with the condition we actually have, and we go outside ourselves because we do not know what is within us. So there is really no point getting up on stilts, for even on stilts we still have to walk on our own legs. And on the most exalted throne in the world, we still have to sit upon our own bottom.

Michel de Montaigne

Appropriately.

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.

Michel de Montaigne

Masterpiece.

We are great fools. “He has spent his life in idleness,” we say; “I have done nothing today.” What, have you not lived? That is not only the most fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations.  To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.

Harold Bloom

Clearly.

Our eyes see nothing behind us. A hundred times a day we make fun of ourselves in the person of our neighbor and detest in others the defects that are more clearly in ourselves, and wonder at them with prodigious imprudence and heedlessness.

Michel Montaigne

Extraordinary.

Having escaped so many pits of death whereinto we have seen so many other men to fall, we should acknowledge that so extraordinary a fortune as that which has hitherto kept us above ground beyond the ordinary term of life is not likely to continue long.

Michel de Montaigne

Imagined.

Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?

Michel de Montaigne

Appropriately.

Anonymous, Michel de Montaigne, 1590

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most. If you walk on stilts, you're still walking on your feet. If you sit on the highest throne in the world, you're still sitting on your ass.

Michel de Montaigne