"I quote others only in order the better to express myself"
About this Quote
Borrowed words, in Montaigne's hands, aren’t a crutch; they’re a mirror. “I quote others only in order the better to express myself” flips the usual hierarchy of authority. The Renaissance humanist is supposed to cite the ancients to prove he belongs in the room. Montaigne cites them to prove the opposite: that the room is already inside his head, noisy with other people’s sentences, and that thinking is less a solo performance than a well-run conversation.
The line carries a sly, almost modern defensiveness. Quotation can look like deference or name-dropping, a way to outsource judgment to prestige. Montaigne admits the suspicion and disarms it: I’m not hiding behind Plato; I’m using Plato as a tuning fork. The subtext is that the self is not pure, not original in the heroic sense. It’s assembled, revised, tested against other minds. Quoting becomes a technique of self-portraiture.
Context matters. In the Essais, Montaigne pioneers a form built on digression, anecdote, and contradiction. He distrusts system-building and prefers trial runs of thought. The quote reads like an editorial philosophy for that project: other voices are tools for precision, not proof. He scavenges sentences the way a careful writer steals a metaphor - not to mask emptiness, but to get closer to what he means.
It’s also a quiet rebuke to dogmatism. If you need others’ words to speak more accurately as yourself, certainty becomes suspect and humility becomes method.
The line carries a sly, almost modern defensiveness. Quotation can look like deference or name-dropping, a way to outsource judgment to prestige. Montaigne admits the suspicion and disarms it: I’m not hiding behind Plato; I’m using Plato as a tuning fork. The subtext is that the self is not pure, not original in the heroic sense. It’s assembled, revised, tested against other minds. Quoting becomes a technique of self-portraiture.
Context matters. In the Essais, Montaigne pioneers a form built on digression, anecdote, and contradiction. He distrusts system-building and prefers trial runs of thought. The quote reads like an editorial philosophy for that project: other voices are tools for precision, not proof. He scavenges sentences the way a careful writer steals a metaphor - not to mask emptiness, but to get closer to what he means.
It’s also a quiet rebuke to dogmatism. If you need others’ words to speak more accurately as yourself, certainty becomes suspect and humility becomes method.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Essais). English translation commonly given as: "I quote others only in order the better to express myself." (attributed) |
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