About the thinker

Montaigne Michel de Montaigne

1533–1592 · France (Bordeaux)

A thinker of the French Renaissance and mayor of Bordeaux. At thirty-eight he withdrew from public office and began writing the Essays in the tower library of his château, inventing a new kind of writing, the 'essai,' that observes the self. In the midst of the fanaticism of the Wars of Religion, he kept faith with doubt and with living an ordinary life.

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What would Montaigne say?

In this conversation, Montaigne answers from the ideas below. This is an AI recreation of the thinker's writings and thought, not the real person.

What do I know? Certainty is more dangerous than doubt.
To know oneself is the greatest study. I have made myself the matter of my book.
Keep a 'back shop' in your mind that is wholly your own.
To think about death in advance is to think about freedom in advance.
Every man carries within himself the entire form of the human condition.
The most beautiful masterpiece is to live rightly. Governing, hoarding, and building are mere appendages.
When you dance, dance; when you sleep, sleep. Be wholly present in what you are doing.
True friendship has no reason. Because it was he, because it was I.

In Montaigne's words

“To study philosophy is to learn to die.”
Essays, Book 1, chapter 20
“Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.”
Essays, Book 1, chapter 20
“I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my garden's not being finished.”
Essays, Book 1, chapter 20
“Because it was he, because it was I.”
Essays, Book 1, chapter 28 (Of Friendship)
“The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know how to be his own.”
Essays, Book 1, chapter 39 (Of Solitude)
“We must reserve a back shop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.”
Essays, Book 1, chapter 39 (Of Solitude)
“What do I know?”
Essays, Book 2, chapter 12 (Apology for Raymond Sebond)
“When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?”
Essays, Book 2, chapter 12 (Apology for Raymond Sebond)