Shakespeare's Montaigne

“He was the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man.” —William Hazlitt
 
“That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on Earth.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
 
“Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
“I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: ‘How did he know all that about me?’ ” —Bernard Levin, The Times (London)
 
“So much have I made him my own, that it seems he is my very self.” —André Gide
 
“Here is a ‘you’ in which ‘I’ is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished.” —Stefan Zweig
 
“Don’t read him as children do, for amusement, nor as the ambitious do, to be instructed. No, read him in order to live.” —Gustave Flaubert
 
“It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there.” —Blaise Pascal
 
“Upon his version of Montaigne’s Essays [Florio] exhausted his gifts and lavished his temperament. ...Turn where you will in his translation, and you will find flowers of speech.” —The Cambridge History of English and American Literature
 
“Like Montaigne, [Florio] wrote by exuding ever more complex thoughts as a spider exudes silk. But while Montaigne always moves forward, Florio winds back on himself and scrunches his sentences in a puff of syntax. The real magic happens when the two writers meet. Montaigne’s earthiness holds Florio’s convolutions in check, while Florio gives Montaigne an Elizabethan English quality, as well as a lot of sheer fun.” —Sara Bakewell, How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne