What We Bring to Them

“That our opinion gives value to things is seen by the many things that we do not think about even to appraise them, preferring to think about ourselves instead. We consider neither their qualities not their uses, but only the cost of us getting them, as if that were some part of their substance; and we call value in them not what they bring, but what we bring to them. At which point I note that we are great economizers of our expenditure. According as it weighs, it serves by the very fact that it weighs. Our opinion never lets it run at a false valuation. Purchase gives value to the diamond, and difficulty to virtue, and pain to piety, and harshness to medicine.” (I:14, 43, Frame)

Social Dexterity

“It is a very useful knowledge, this knowledge of social dexterity. Like grace and beauty, it acts as a moderator at the fist approaches of sociability and familiarity, and consequently opens the door for us to learning by the examples of others, and to bringing forth and displaying our own example, if it has anything instructive and communicable about it.” (I:13, 33, Frame)

Shooting All Day

“I see some who study and comment on their almanacs and cite their authority in current events. With all they say, they necessarily tell both truth and falsehood. For who is there who, shooting all day, will not sometime hit the mark? [Cicero] I think none the better of them to see them sometimes happen to hit the truth; there would be more certainty in it, if it were the rule and the truth that they always lied. Besides, no one keeps a record of their mistakes, inasmuch as these are ordinary and numberless; and their correct divinations are made much of because they are rare, incredible, and prodigious. In this way Diagoras, who was surnamed the Atheist, replied to the man in Samothrace, who, showing him in the temple many votive offerings and tables of those who have escaped shipwreck, said to him: ‘Well, you who think that the gods care nothing about human affairs, what do you say about so many men saved by their grace?’ ‘This is how it happens,’ Diagoras answered. ‘Those who were drowned, in much greater number, are not portrayed here.'” (I:11, 29, Frame)

Agitation, Its Life and Grace

“We say of certain works that they smell of oil and the lamp, because of a certain harshness and roughness that labor imprints on productions in which it has a large part. But besides this, the anxiety to do well, and the tension of straining too intently on one’s work, put the soul on the rack, break it, and make it impotent; as happens with water, which because of the very pressure of its violence and abundance cannot find a way out of an open bottle-neck. It is no less peculiar to the kind of temperament I am speaking of, that it wants to be stimulated: not shaken and stung by such passions as Cassius’ anger (for that emotion would be too violent); not shocked; but roused and warmed up by external, present, and accidental stimuli. If it goes along all by itself, it does nothing but drag and languish. Agitation is its very life and grace. I have little control over myself and my moods. Chance has more power here than I. The occasion, the company, the very sound of my voice, draw more from my mind than I find in it when I sound it and use it by myself. Thus its speech is better than its writings.” (I:11, 26, Frame)

The Magazine of Memory

Montaigne says that “there is no man who has less business talking about memory. For I recognize no trace of it in me, and I do not think there is another one in the world so monstrously deficient.” He has “some consolation,” though. “As several similar examples of nature’s processes demonstrate, nature has tended to strengthen other faculties in me in proportion as my memory has grown weaker; and I might easily rest my mind and judgment and let them grow languid following on others’ traces, as everyone does, without exercising their own strength, if other men’s discoveries and opinions were always present to me by virtue of my memory. My speech is the briefer for it. For the magazine of memory is apt to be better furnished with matter than that of invention.” (I:9, 22, Frame)