"The ideas I had naturally formed for myself about man," he says, "I confirmed and fortified by the authority of others and by the sound examples of the ancients, with whom I found my judgment in conformity." Born in 1533, at the castle of Montaigne in Perigord, and carefully brought up by "the good father God had given him," Michael de Montaigne was, in his childhood, "so heavy, lazy, and sleepy, that he could not be roused from sloth, even for the sake of play." He passed several years in the Parliament of Bordeaux, but "he had never taken a liking to jurisprudence, though his father had steeped him in it, when quite a child, to his very lips, and he was always asking himself why common language, so easy for every other purpose, becomes obscure and unintelligible in a contract or will, which made him fancy that the men of law had muddled everything in order to render themselves necessary." He had lost the only man he had ever really loved, Stephen de la Boetie, an amiable and noble philosopher, counsellor in the Parliament of Bordeaux.

"If I am pressed to declare why I loved him," Montaigne used to say, "I feel that it can only be expressed by answering, because he was he, and I was I." Montaigne gave up the Parliament, and travelled in Switzerland and Italy, often stopping at Paris, and gladly returning to his castle of Montaigne, where he wrote down what he had seen; "hungering for self-knowledge," inquiring, indolent, without ardor for work, an enemy of all constraint, he was at the same time frank and subtle, gentle, humane, and moderate.

As an inquiring spectator, without personal ambition, he had taken for his life's motto, "Who knows?
(Que sais-je ?)" Amidst the wars of religion he remained without political or religious passion.

"I am disgusted by novelty, whatever aspect it may assume, and with good reason," he would say, "for I have seen some very disastrous effects of it." Outside as well as within himself, Montaigne studied mankind without regard to order and without premeditated plan.
"I have no drill-sergeant to arrange my pieces (of writing) save hap-hazard only," he writes; "just as my ideas present themselves, I heap them together; sometimes they come rushing in a throng, sometimes they straggle single file.

I like to be seen at my natural and ordinary pace, all a-hobble though it be; I let myself go, just as it happens.