"I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself"
About this Quote
Writing, for Montaigne, isn’t a hobby or a public service. It’s a pressure valve. The line has the calm, almost domestic candor of someone admitting that the world’s incoherence is not an abstract puzzle but a psychological hazard. “Keep from going mad” names what polite philosophy often disguises: thinking isn’t always ennobling; it’s destabilizing. The contradictions “among mankind” aren’t just hypocrisies out there in the crowd, they’re evidence that reason, custom, faith, and appetite rarely line up neatly in any one person. Including the writer.
The subtext is Montaigne’s signature move: downgrade certainty. Instead of promising a system to fix human nature, he frames prose as self-triage. That small pivot - from diagnosing mankind to “for myself” - matters. It’s an early-modern refusal of the prophet’s stance. He doesn’t claim to stand above the mess; he claims to be inside it, using sentences to see what he actually thinks when competing impulses collide. The “work some of those contradictions out” is modest on purpose: not solve, not eradicate, just loosen the knot enough to live with it.
Context sharpens the stakes. Montaigne writes in a France convulsed by religious wars, where grand doctrines justified slaughter with clean logic. Against that brutality of certainty, his essay becomes an ethics: the page as a space where ambiguity is allowed to exist without demanding a body count. His intent isn’t to end contradiction; it’s to make it legible - and therefore survivable.
The subtext is Montaigne’s signature move: downgrade certainty. Instead of promising a system to fix human nature, he frames prose as self-triage. That small pivot - from diagnosing mankind to “for myself” - matters. It’s an early-modern refusal of the prophet’s stance. He doesn’t claim to stand above the mess; he claims to be inside it, using sentences to see what he actually thinks when competing impulses collide. The “work some of those contradictions out” is modest on purpose: not solve, not eradicate, just loosen the knot enough to live with it.
Context sharpens the stakes. Montaigne writes in a France convulsed by religious wars, where grand doctrines justified slaughter with clean logic. Against that brutality of certainty, his essay becomes an ethics: the page as a space where ambiguity is allowed to exist without demanding a body count. His intent isn’t to end contradiction; it’s to make it legible - and therefore survivable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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