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Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Volume 10 cover

Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Volume 10

Chapter 7: ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
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About This Book

A series of reflective essays that meditate on subjects including ceremonies of honour, paternal affection, Parthian military customs, the practice of reading, and the character of cruelty. The writer blends personal anecdote, classical allusion, and fragmentary argument to reveal habits of mind and limits of knowledge, often confessing uncertainty and preferring candid self-scrutiny to doctrinal theory. Emphasis falls on practical judgment, the pleasures and restraints of reading, and the social uses of symbolic rewards, while style favors digression, erudite borrowing without exhaustive citation, and an aim to disclose the author's temperament rather than to teach definitive doctrines.

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     A little cheese when a mind to make a feast
     A word ill taken obliterates ten years' merit
     Cato said: So many servants, so many enemies
     Cherish themselves most where they are most wrong
     Condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul
     Cruelty is the very extreme of all vices
     Disguise, by their abridgments and at their own choice
     Epicurus
     Flatterer in your old age or in your sickness
     He felt a pleasure and delight in so noble an action
     He judged other men by himself
     I cannot well refuse to play with my dog
     I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them rather
     I had rather be old a brief time, than be old before old age
     I owe it rather to my fortune than my reason
     Incline the history to their own fancy
     It (my books) may know many things that are gone from me
     Knowledge and truth may be in us without judgment
     Learn the theory from those who best know the practice
     Loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men
     Motive to some vicious occasion or some prospect of profit
     My books: from me hold that which I have not retained
     My dog unseasonably importunes me to play
     My innocence is a simple one; little vigour and no art.
     Never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions
     Nothing tempts my tears but tears
     Omit, as incredible, such things as they do not understand
     On all occasions to contradict and oppose
     Only desire to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent
     Passion of dandling and caressing infants scarcely born
     Perfection: but I will not buy it so dear as it costs
     Plato will have nobody marry before thirty
     Prudent and just man may be intemperate and inconsistent
     Puerile simplicities of our children
     Shelter my own weakness under these great reputations
     Socrates kept a confounded scolding wife
     The authors, with whom I converse
     There is no recompense becomes virtue
     To do well where there was danger was the proper office
     To whom no one is ill who can be good?
     Turks have alms and hospitals for beasts
     Vices will cling together, if a man have not a care
     Virtue is much strengthened by combats
     Virtue refuses facility for a companion