Wit & Attitude Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne lands this like a polite knife: the problem isn’t having convictions, it’s treating them like property you can’t bear to lose. “Stubborn and ardent” is doing the heavy lifting. Stubbornness suggests a refusal to update; ardor suggests emotional investment, the heat of ego. Put together, they describe an opinion that’s stopped being an instrument for thinking and turned into a badge for belonging. The “best proof” jab is classic Montaigne: dryly empirical, almost amused. If you want evidence of stupidity, don’t look for ignorance; watch how fiercely someone defends a position no longer tethered to reality.

The subtext is self-implicating. Montaigne’s essays are basically a long experiment in intellectual humility, written in an age when certainty got people burned, exiled, or drafted into religious slaughter. In 16th-century France, “clinging” wasn’t just a personality flaw; it was a civic hazard. Dogma hardened into violence. Montaigne’s skepticism is less a posture than a survival skill: keep your mind movable, because history is a machine that rewards inflexibility with catastrophe.

What makes the line work is its inversion of status. Most cultures praise steadfastness; Montaigne reframes it as evidence against you. He’s not romanticizing doubt for its own sake, either. He’s diagnosing the moment opinion becomes identity. Once belief is fused to pride, changing your mind feels like self-erasure, so the defense gets “ardent.” Montaigne calls that stupidity because it blocks the one act intelligence requires: revision.