Essays of Michel De Montaigne Hardcover – January 1, 1947

Montaigne is considered the father the personal essay. And within them, it seems, there is not a topic he didn't cover. After serving in the Bordeaux Parlement, in 1570 "he retired to his chateau...to read, think, and write." This is where his essays are born, late in his life, and soon to be suffering from kidney stones, which would take his life (he discusses his mistrust of doctors in "Of The Resemblance Of Children To Their Fathers") The tone of essays reveal someone who was highly skeptical and pessimestic. But you quickly gain a sense of how intelligent and honest this man was. Montaigne, in the preface, implies the essays are written to discover and reveal himself and recommends that no one should waste their "leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject." Although, here he is greatly mistaken. Montaigne, to me, was a genius; and there is so much wisdom one can part with after reading only a few of his essays, as can be seen in his influence over brillant minds like Shakespeare and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Any library would seem bare without him. Some favorite quotes from his "The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself." "A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude." "Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom." Read more