It is not a soul, not a body, that we are educating; it is a man (I. xxvi).
Unable to regulate events, I regulate myself, and adjust myself to them if they do not adjust themselves to me (II. xvii).
The teaching that could not reach their souls has stayed on their lips (III. iii).
Between ourselves, two things have always seemed to me in singular accord, supercelestial opinions and subterranean morals (III. xiii).
For Montaigne’s shrewd summaries prevail less often by balanced sentences than by concrete diction.
I am seldom seized by these violent passions. My sensibility is naturally dense; and I encrust and thicken it daily by discourse (I. ii).
Anybody’s job is worth sounding; a cowherd’s, a mason’s, a passer-by’s, all should be turned to use, and each lend its wares; for everything comes handy in the kitchen (I. xxvi).
Such sentences, such diction, are not only his practice; they are part of his literary theory.
The speech that I like is simple and direct, the same on paper as on the lips, speech succulent and prompt (nerveux), curt and compact, not so much delicate and smoothed as vehement and brusque—Haec demum sapiet dictio quae feriet—rather tough than tiresome, shunning affectation, irregular, loose, and bold, each bit for itself, not pedantic, not scholastic, not legal, but rather soldierly (I. xxvi).