The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne

• The complete essays of Michel Montaigne are personal but are more general thoughts pertaining to life in stead of his life.
• Montaigne lived his life in sixteenth century in France.
• Montaigne's main topics he wrote about were happiness, children's education, repentance, and solitude.
• During his time period there was much religious conviction.
• Michel Montaigne is skeptic towards the after life posing the question "What do I know?"
• Throughout the essays Michel Montaigne refers to a backroom. This backroom is a room where people can escape the front room. The front room is where you meet with people in life and socialize. The back room is suppose to be the back of the house.
• Montaigne wants to be accustomed to death. He doesn't want to be scared or frightened of the future. He wants to take it with ease.
• All his life Montaigne was a Roman Catholic.
• Most of his essays in this book are from Michel de Montaigne's thoughts and nobody elses.
• His essays have no unity or structure in them.
• Montaigne describes the essays as his children to give them a more personal look.
• Most of Montaigne's thoughts and imagination comes from the past.
• Physiognomy is the art of judging human character from facial features.
• According to Montaigne, he believes that there is nothing more unjust than when something wicked becomes lawful.
• Montaigne explains that it is human nature for even facts to be questioned because not everybody who relays information onto another person knows where the truth or story first took place. People keep relaying the information they heard onto other people because it is natural to feed into these so called facts that along the way could have exaggerated a little bit to make what has been told more interesting.
• In the case of Socrates who was an ugly man, he had the most beautiful mind and soul. The saying might no mean a person has to be beautiful to have a beautiful soul it could mean in Socrates case that he was ugly in order to disprove this theory.
• Being beautiful can mean many things. It doesn't always mean from the outside. Because you can be beautiful from the outside and not inside, or both, or beautiful on the inside and not the outside.
• Nobody can make you happy unless a person is happy with themselves first.
• The power of freedom over oneself can be harder to attain but is not unlikely to have, a person just has to be willing to fight it.
• The thought of knowing when a certain thing will happen will make the person tormented on when it will happen.
• People who think about suffering actually feel the suffering because knowing something is going to happen can be a blessing or a curse.
• The point of departure of the essays is negativity.
• Michel de Montaigne sees the human being as weak full of failure.
• The whole time the essays puts out the question of all knowing.
• Often he rejects commonly accepted ideas. This is mainly because he uses skepticism a lot.
• All of his essays are not to be formal or instruct us how to do something with a clear purpose. The don't even sometimes have intentions in the writing.
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• The essays mean "to test" or "to try". In this view his complete essays were written successfully in that he wanted to put a personal note on them with his experiences and life stories.
• Some topics that he uses in the essays include education, happiness, repentance and many more.
• His life stories and experiences had to do with cruelty and the disorder that came with the religious conviction.
• This was when he lived in sixteenth century France.
• He put emphasis on trying to see his subjects from different point of views.
• Part of the reason his works were so good was because he read so many books that just enhanced his knowledge.
• He makes sure to utilize his quotations and put a unique style on everything which is relaxed, but humorous.  One quotation he wrote was that was in the end of the essays under Of Experience “The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern.."
• In the eleventh essay the topic is virtue that Montaigne writes about. He explains to the reader that virtue is much more than just being good.
• The reader doesn't have to read very far to realize that Montaigne writes out of respect to the past. Mainly, he centers around Greece and Rome.
• Some skills that Montaigne uses a lot are irony and references to the past.
• A lot of the time when he is writing he has a concern for the readers, but in some other parts he holds a message for the readers.
• During his time Montaigne when writing the Complete Essays was known to have a modern voice in the literary period.
• His purpose is to limit or redirect the traditional activities of the people. These people mainly being intellectual and intelligent people.