Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne

Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.7
Word count
63K words
Chapters
7

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Life PhilosophySocial ConductSkepticismIntellectual EnlightenmentMoral CultivationSelf-ReflectionEssaysRenaissance

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne by Michel de MontaigneAuthor: Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592,Language: English, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Sep 3, 2004

Editor's review

This is a collection of quotations and illustrations from Montaigne's works, released by Project Gutenberg and presented in English. Montaigne was a sixteenth-century French essayist whose Essays are known for self-observation, skepticism, and everyday philosophical reflection, in a style both intimate and speculative. This small volume selects quotations from Montaigne's works and pairs them with images; its value lies in giving readers a light way to encounter fragments of his thought and to feel his candid discussion of human nature, habit, death, and education. It works as a trial entrance into Montaigne's essays, and also for readers who have already read Montaigne and want to revisit memorable aphorisms at random. It should be noted that once quotations are taken out of context, some views may seem fragmentary, and that this book is a reference compilation lacking notes and background explanation; readers who want deeper understanding still need to return to the original Essays. Overall, it is an aphoristic book suited to slow reading and repeated browsing.

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Reading tips

  1. Read only a few sentences at a time, pause to consider how they relate to your own experience, then continue.
  2. Group favorite sentences by theme, such as habit, death, and education, to form your own excerpt notes.
  3. Read alongside the chapters of the same name in Montaigne's Essays to understand the complete argument of each quotation in its original context.
  4. Use it as bedtime or commute reading; there is no need to finish it in one go—the point is to savor it repeatedly.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7

FAQ

Is this book a complete translation of Montaigne's Essays? No. It is a collection of quotations and illustrations released by Project Gutenberg, selecting sayings from Montaigne's works and pairing them with images. It is an anthology, not the complete chapters or a full translation of the Essays; it is suited to browsing and savoring, not to systematic reading as the original work.
Can I read this book without a philosophy background? Yes. Montaigne's essays center on everyday experience and self-observation; the language is not abstruse, and the quotation format lowers the barrier further. Even without a philosophy background, readers can resonate with his candid discussion of human nature and life—though deeper understanding still requires the original context.
Does taking quotations out of context affect understanding? To some extent, yes. Many of Montaigne's views are supported in the original by concrete examples and surrounding argument; taken alone, they may seem one-sided or overly absolute. It is best to treat this book as a set of leads: when a sentence interests you, return to the corresponding chapter of the Essays to read the full context.
Is this book suitable as a gift or for collecting? As a public-domain e-book, it has plain layout and is mainly text, so it is better suited to personal reading and casual browsing than to being a fine gift or collector's edition. If you want to collect Montaigne's works, choose a formal, annotated, and well-designed translation of the Essays.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592 Author

Montaigne (Michel de Montaigne, 1533-1592) was a French essayist, best known for his Essais (Essays). Born in the Périgord region of southwestern France, he studied law, served at the Bordeaux Parlement, and twice became mayor of Bordeaux. After turning thirty-eight, he retired to a tower study in his family château and began writing the Essais, which he continued to expand and revise until his death. The work founded the essay as a literary form, exploring human nature, education, friendship, death, habit, and experience in a frank, self-reflective, and skeptical tone. Its intimate style, rich in quotations yet unmistakably personal, makes it a foundational work of modern prose, with a lasting influence on European literature and thought. The collection here includes 27 of his works, among them the volumes of the Essais and their complete English translation.