Education Quote by Pierre Charron

Self-knowledge gets pitched here not as a wellness hobby but as the neglected infrastructure of a sane life. Charron loads the sentence with superlatives - “most excellent,” “divine,” “best,” “most profitable” - and then undercuts the puffery with the dagger: “but the least practiced.” The move is strategic. He’s not trying to flatter the reader into introspection; he’s shaming a culture that loves advice more than discipline, doctrine more than self-scrutiny. The irony is that the “highway to whatever is good” is sitting in plain sight, avoided precisely because it’s harder than performing virtue.

Context matters. Charron is writing in late-16th-century France, in the long aftershock of the Wars of Religion, when moral certainty was a weapon and theological factions treated conscience like contested territory. A philosopher-theologian adjacent to Montaigne, he distrusts the ego’s tendency to dress up prejudice as conviction. “To know ourselves” isn’t a self-esteem slogan; it’s an anti-fanaticism technology. If you can identify your appetites, fears, and borrowed opinions, you’re less likely to confuse them with truth.

Even the phrasing “profitable advertisement” is telling: he frames wisdom like a sales pitch, then implies we’ve been buying the wrong product. The subtext is a critique of secondhand morality. You can memorize rules, wear the right beliefs, join the right side - and still be a stranger to the motives steering you. Charron’s “foundation” is an insistence that ethics without self-knowledge is just theater with better lighting.