Where to Start
107 chapters is a lot to face cold. Here are eleven worth reading first — each with a plain-English hook and a real passage in Montaigne's own words.
The chapter within the chapters
Apology for Raimond Sebond
Buried inside Book II is a single chapter that swells to roughly 2,000 lines — something like a sixth of the entire Essays by itself. It's nominally a defence of a forgotten Spanish theologian, but Montaigne uses it as cover to interrogate everything: human certainty, animal intelligence, the vanity of reason itself. It's here that he lands on the question that became his motto.
“This fancy will be more certainly understood by interrogation: “What do I know?” as I bear it with the emblem of a balance.
Know Thyself, Doubt Everything
Of Presumption
A whole essay on vanity and self-regard, written by a man taking pains to confess he has less than his share of it. Bluntly, almost uncomfortably honest about his own limits, in a way few people manage about themselves even now.
“I think it would be very difficult for any other man to have a meaner opinion of himself; nay, for any other to have a meaner opinion of me than of myself.
Friendship & Solitude
Of Friendship
Montaigne's tribute to Étienne de La Boétie, the friend he lost after only four years of knowing him, and the emotional center of gravity for nearly everything he wrote afterward. Contains one of the most quoted sentences about friendship ever set down.
“If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.
Of Solitude
Less a retreat from people than an argument for owning yourself first — written just after he'd stepped back from public life to try to do exactly that.
“The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own.
Death & How to Live
That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die
Its argument is blunt: the only cure for the fear of death is to think about it constantly, on purpose, until it stops being strange. Ancient in its examples — the Egyptians brought a skeleton to their feasts — but startlingly modern in its psychology.
“Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death.
Of Repentance
One of the last essays, and one of the most personal: an admission that he isn't describing a finished, settled self at all — just a moving target he keeps tracking, day by day.
“Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future.
Of Experience
The very last essay in the book. After 106 chapters of citing Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, he closes by trusting his own body and plain daily experience over any book — including, pointedly, his own.
“Oh, what a soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, whereon to repose a well-ordered head!
Raising Minds, Reading Books
Of the Education of Children
Montaigne's own theory of schooling, centuries ahead of its time: judgment over memorization, character over Latin declensions, curiosity kept alive rather than drilled out of a child.
“I would, also, have his friends solicitous to find him out a tutor, who has rather a well-made than a well-filled head.
Of Books
A short, disarming essay on why he reads at all — not to seem learned, but for company, on his own terms.
“I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an honest diversion; or, if I study, ‘tis for no other science than what treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and how to live well.
Looking at the Wider World
Of Cannibals
Built from an actual eyewitness account of Brazil, a century before it was fashionable to question European superiority this directly — the essay would later feed straight into a famous speech in Shakespeare's The Tempest.
“I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.
Of Cruelty
A rare moment for the 16th century: a nobleman going out of his way to say that cruelty to animals is unacceptable, cataloguing his own soft-heartedness almost like a confession.
“Amongst other vices, I mortally hate cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the very extreme of all vices: nay, with so much tenderness that I cannot see a chicken’s neck pulled off without trouble, and cannot without impatience endure the cry of a hare in my dog’s teeth, though the chase be a violent pleasure.
All quotes above are verbatim from Charles Cotton's 1877 translation (ed. Hazlitt) — see the Commonplace Book for more of the same in smaller bites.