Due to their heterogeneous subjects, the essays of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) cannot be easily summarized in quotes and one-liners. Nevertheless, I am going to present here those quotes that I consider most relevant for conveying Montaigne’s key messages.
Montaigne’s essays constitute the output of twenty years of quite labour. Amidst religious wars, political strife, famine and pestilence, Montaigne stayed loyal to his daily habits. He didn’t allow anyone or anything to disrupt his reading and writing.
To those who are learning to appreciate Montaigne, I advise to read his essay titled “On Books.” Literary historians have established that Montaigne was already fifty years old when he wrote it. In a way, he conceived this essay as a summary of the insights he had accumulated through the years.
Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Books”
[1] When did Montaigne mean when he wrote that “I do not measure my wisdom by the number of books in my library, but by their practical use.”
In today’s terms, his library was not very large. It must have consisted of about one hundred volumes; that’s a small fraction of the number of books we can store nowadays in the memory of a tablet or smart phone.
However, there is a key difference between Montaigne and most owners of tablets or smart phones. Few people nowadays read complete books, let alone numerous books per year. They prefer to watch videos or listen to podcasts.
In contrast, Montaigne read his hundred volumes with great interest, and then reread them many times. His wanted to draw every drop of wisdom from those books and improve his life.
[2] Reading develops one’s critical thinking. That’s why he wrote that “I trust my own judgment more than the opinions and teachings of learned parties.”
Montaigne had acquired his self-confident thinking through twenty years of re-reading great books. Note that the ability to think critically didn’t come to him out of the blue. It’s the result of steady work, day in and day out.
The trust in one’s intellect comes from using it daily, not from bravado or wishful thinking. Montaigne’s essays cover a large multiplicity of subjects. Those are areas in which he was looking for answers, or for arguments to support his views.
Montaigne’s method for cultivating wisdom
[3] No book is going to provide all the answers we need in the exact format and the right time. Their contents need to be processed, integrated and assimilated. That’s the normal course of events when it comes to learning.
Montaigne was aware of the subjectivity of learning. Each reader is going to draw from a book the lessons most useful to him at that time, perhaps ignoring others of crucial importance.
This is how Montaigne conveyed this idea: “Books can lead readers to learning, but also to madness.” They tend to magnify one’s intellectual skills for better or for worse, sharpening them or weakening them, depending on how we process the inputs.
[4] Good biographies contain plenty of wisdom and they are pleasant to read. Montaigne held especially the “Lives” written by Plutarch (46-120 AD) in high regard.
No wonder that Montaigne call Plutarch’s “Lives” extremely profitable. They are densely filled with anecdotes and remarks that teach readers valuable lessons. For the purpose of gaining wisdom, it does not matter if Plutarch sometimes improvises or invents some details.
Montaigne described reading as a spiritual conversation that readers hold with the author. “Reading a book is a conversation with the author,” he wrote, pointing amongst others to Plutarch and Plato (427-347 BC).
Yet, he should have added that such a conversation requires familiarity with the subject at hand. When Montaigne recounts anecdotes about Socrates (469-399 BC), he gets quickly to the point. This means that he had deep knowledge of Plato’s works that retell, very disorderly, bits and pieces of Socrates’ life.
Montaigne’s view of literature as eye-opener
[5] It requires sustained efforts to identify the relevant facts and draw correct conclusions. I can easily tell beginners in the area of investments because of their inability to focus. They go from one dataset and graphic to the next, jumping from theory to theory, unable to distinguish the relevant facts.
Montaigne realized that a similar learning process takes place in all areas of human activity. Books provide remarkable help in this respect because they sharpen our intellect and open our eyes.
“The best books are those that enable us to see,” ascertained Montaigne after decades of reading. When he wrote his essay “On Books,” he had already spent twenty years re-reading the volumes in his library, and realized how much they had opened his eyes. He could now tell apart relevant from irrelevant facts.
Montaigne’s opinion of emotions in literature
[6] Criticism is not missing in Montaigne’s essays. His long experience as a lawyer, mediator, farmer, and public official in the middle of savage wars had made him distrust barren words and gestures.
Montaigne recognized that most books were not interesting enough for re-reading. That’s why his essays are returning once and again to Seneca (4 BC-AD 65) and Epictetus (AD 55-135). He found their arguments emotionally engaging, enjoyable and memorable.
Readers tend to lose interest in cool-blooded books, that is, those that fail to engage one’s emotions. Montaigne affirmed that “The books I enjoy most are those that appeal to the heart” although he rarely quotes fictional stories.
He uses the wording “appeal to the heart” to denote a moral, educational, philosophical element present in all his favourite authors. His criticism of dry theories is brutal in the sense that he simply ignores them.
This explains why Montaigne is quoting dozens of times the “Nicomachean Ethics” by Aristotle (384-322 BC) while paying no attention to the “Prior Analytics” and “Posterior Analytics.”
Philosophically, such an approach weakens his overall logic and reach, but emotionally, it renders his essays more lively. It makes them much more attractive to readers simply seeking a path to happiness.
If you are interested in putting rational ideas into practice in all sort of situations here and now, I recommend you my book titled “Sequentiality: The amazing power of finding the right sequence of steps.”