The Complete Essays
Read this if you…
- want the first guy who just wrote a bunch of essays and people still read it
- like a guy who is overly skeptical of his own knowledge, and talks about it way too much
- like a guy who quotes ancients constantly
Skip this if you…
- find the self-aware skeptic shtick wearing thin (this happened to me, it got old)
Why It Matters
Montaigne invented the essay. The word "essai" means "attempt," and he used it to think on paper about everything from cannibals to kidney stones. His flat honesty about his own contradictions, habits, and fears opened up a new way of writing about being human. Every essayist after him, Bacon, Orwell, Joan Didion, is working in a form Montaigne built.
The 
Take
Some gold in there for sure and his knowledge of ancient authors is unmatched and the constant quoting of the likes of Virgil and Cicero is unmatched.The self awareness thing seems groundbreaking and such, but it is overdone, and it gets old after a while .
The lineage through The Complete Essays
- Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. The Complete Essays built on it. - The voice Montaigne couldn't stop quoting — Seneca is his single most-cited author across the *Essays* - "That to Philosophise is to Learn to Die" leans on these letters directly and by name - Read *Letters from a Stoic* first and you hear the model: philosophy written as candid, self-examining letters, which is exactly what Montaigne made his own
- Plutarch's Lives by Plutarch. The Complete Essays built on it. - The *Essays* don't just quote Plutarch — they grow out of him; Montaigne said Amyot's translation lifted him "out of the mire of ignorance" - Plutarch's habit of judging a man by a stray gesture is the method Montaigne redirects onto his own mind - Read him first and you'll catch Montaigne thinking with Plutarch's tools — even the Apology for Raymond Sebond ends by rewriting him
- On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. The Complete Essays built on it. - Lucretius is woven through the *Essays* — quoted nearly a hundred times, and never more than where Montaigne confronts death and doubt - Montaigne's surviving copy of *On the Nature of Things*, annotated in his own hand, is a direct window into how hard he read it - Reading Lucretius first sharpens "To philosophise is to learn to die" and the "Apology for Raymond Sebond" — you'll hear the source under Montaigne's voice
- Metamorphoses by Ovid. The Complete Essays built on it. - Montaigne names Ovid's *Metamorphoses* as the very first book to give him a love of reading, discovered at seven or eight — the origin point of the mind behind the *Essays* - He quotes it throughout, and its great theme — perpetual change, nothing fixed — runs straight into his own restless self-portrait - Read it to meet the boy before the essayist; the flux Montaigne keeps circling started in Ovid's lines
- The Aeneid by Virgil. The Complete Essays built on it. - The *Essays* are studded with the *Aeneid* — Montaigne quotes Virgil more than almost any other author and devotes a whole essay to weighing his verses - In 'On Books' he places Virgil among the four poets who 'by many degrees excel the rest' and judges *Aeneid* Book 5 'the most perfect' poetry - Reading the epic first lets you catch the lines Montaigne is reaching for — and see a great prose mind treating Virgil as both ornament and argument
- The Odes of Horace by Horatius. The Complete Essays built on it. - Horace is the poet Montaigne reaches for most — the *Odes* run through the *Essays* by the dozen, capping arguments on fortune and how to live - Montaigne placed Horace among the four poets who outstrip all others, and gave him the last word of the entire work - Read the *Odes* first and you'll recognize the voice behind Montaigne's — enough that he was nicknamed "the French Horace"
- The Works of Cicero by Marcus Tullius Cicero. The Complete Essays built on it. - Cicero is one of the load-bearing names in the *Essays* — Montaigne quotes, paraphrases, and argues with him page after page - "That to study philosophy is to learn to die" (I.20) takes its title and core claim directly from the *Tusculan Disputations* - Knowing the Cicero behind the borrowing turns Montaigne's offhand citations into a running conversation you can hear both sides of
- Pensées by Blaise Pascal. The Complete Essays shaped it. - Pascal named Montaigne, alongside Epictetus, as one of his two most-read books — and said so plainly in his 1655 conversation with M. de Saci - Montaigne's *Essays* hand Pascal his starting material: the radical skepticism and the restless, self-contradicting human animal of the *Apology for Raymond Sebond* - The *Pensées* borrow that doubt and that anatomy of human disquiet — then bend both toward God, which Montaigne never did
- The Tempest by William Shakespeare. The Complete Essays shaped it. - The one indisputable Montaigne fingerprint in all of Shakespeare - Gonzalo's fantasy of an ideal commonwealth (*The Tempest* II.i) closely paraphrases Montaigne's *Of the Cannibals* — straight out of Florio's 1603 English translation - The whole essay's argument — that the "savage" New World might shame civilized Europe — gets put in the mouth of a dreaming old courtier
- Self-Reliance and Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Complete Essays shaped it. - The young Emerson read his father's old volume of Montaigne and felt "as if he had himself written the book" — a lifelong kinship - Montaigne's self-trusting skepticism is the bedrock under *Self-Reliance*: trust your own mind, distrust borrowed certainties - Emerson returned the debt openly with a dedicated essay, "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," in *Representative Men*
- Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Complete Essays shaped it. - Montaigne invented the self-portrait in prose — and Rousseau set out to outdo him - Two centuries later the *Confessions* defines itself *against* the *Essays*: Rousseau scorns Montaigne for "feigning" to confess his faults while taking care to give himself only amiable ones - The line runs Augustine → Montaigne → Rousseau — the *Essays* are the link that turns confession into the secular examination of a single ordinary self
- King Lear by William Shakespeare. The Complete Essays shaped it. - Shakespeare read Florio's 1603 translation closely — *King Lear* introduces 100-plus words he had never used before that all appear in it - Greenblatt traces Edmund's speeches and Lear's skeptical core straight to the *Essays*; Edmund even calls his forged letter "an essay or taste of my virtue," a wink at the book - Nietzsche put it flatly: "Shakespeare was Montaigne's best reader"
- Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes. The Complete Essays shaped it. - Montaigne made doubt a method — and Descartes built a system on it - The Pyrrhonian skepticism Montaigne runs through the *Essays* (sharpest in the *Apology for Raymond Sebond*) hands Descartes his starting move: doubt everything, see what survives - Same vernacular, introspective turn inward — but where Montaigne is content to keep questioning, Descartes wants to doubt his way to bedrock certainty
Depicted in Art
Bust-length portrait of Montaigne in his early forties, dark doublet and white ruff against a plain ground; small oil panel.
1578
Oil portrait of Montaigne at age fifty-four, half-length in dark robe and ruff, inscription giving his age beside the head.
Etienne Martellange, 1587
Engraved double portrait of Montaigne with his closest friend Etienne de la Boetie, the friendship that the essay 'Of Friendship' immortalized.
1839
Bust portrait of Montaigne as a young magistrate, beardless or lightly bearded, black robe and small white collar.
Recommended Editions
Donald M. Frame
Stanford University Press · 1958
Frame's 1958 English became the American Montaigne for half a century. Natural, conversational, the prose of a man thinking on the page. Lighter apparatus than Screech and a warmer read.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“What do I know?”
“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.”