Home > Work > The Essays: A Selection
1 " The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation. "
― Michel de Montaigne , The Essays: A Selection
2 " Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments. "
3 " Pride and curiosity are the two scourges of our souls. The latter prompts us to poke our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided. "
4 " We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life. "
5 " Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them. "
6 " Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and make it part of himself, judging the boy's progress by what Plato taught about education. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given. "
7 " Let every foot have its own shoe. "
8 " Were our pupil's disposition so bizarre that he would rather hear a tall story than the account of a great voyage or a wise discussion; that at the sound of a drum calling the youthful ardour of his comrades to arms he would turn aside for the drum of a troop of jugglers; that he would actually find it no more delightful and pleasant to return victorious covered in the dust of battle than after winning a prize for tennis or dancing; then I know no remedy except that his tutor should quickly strangle him when nobody is looking or apprentice him to make fairy-cakes in some goodly town - even if he were the heir of a Duke - following Plato's precept that functions should be allocated not according to the endowments of men's fathers but the endowments of their souls. "
9 " That is why Bias jested with those who were going through the perils of a great storm with him and calling on the gods for help: "Shut up," he said, "so that they do not realize that you are here with me. "
10 " I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero. "
11 " Kanunlar doğru oldukları için değil, kanun oldukları için yürürlükte kalırlar. Kendilerini dinletmeleri akıldışı bir güçten gelir, başka bir şeyden değil. (..) Kanunlardan daha çok, daha ağır, daha geniş haksızlıklara yol açan ne vardır? "
12 " Kendimizden kaçmamız, kendimizde olup biteni bilmememizdendir. "
13 " Bundan sonraki halim ancak yarım bir varlık olacak; ben artık o ben olmayacağım. Gün geçtikçe kendimden ayrılıyor, uzaklaşıyorum. "
14 " Biz pek şaşkın varlıklarız: Filanca hayatını işsiz güçsüz geçirdi, deriz; bugün hiçbir şey yapmadım, deriz. -Bir şey yapmadım da ne demek? Yaşadınız ya! "
15 " For I never see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. "
16 " And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.Therefore, Farewell: "
17 " İnsanın doğuşunu görmekten herkes kaçar ama ölümünü görmeye hep koşa koşa gideriz. İnsanı öldürmek için gün ışığında, geniş meydanlar ararız ama onu yaratmak için karanlık köşelere gizleniriz. "
18 " For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me. "
19 " Bir amaca bağlanmayan ruh yolunu kaybeder. Çünkü her yerde olmak, hiçbir yerde olmamaktır. "
20 " Certainly man is a remarkably vain, variable, and elusive subject.10 It is hard to base any constant, uniform judgment upon him. "
