Citizens Of The World.

WHEN I LOOK AT THE BOOKS on my shelf, it isn’t always the content of each book that comes to mind. I often imagine where I was when I read it, who I was, what I was going through. Books are powerful in this way. We can take them with us anywhere, a companion to help make sense of the world in which we live. Michel de Montaigne, a free thinker of sixteenth-century France gave up a life of aristocracy for this reason.

Montaigne devoted himself more than any other to the sublime art of living: rester soi-même, writes Stefan Zweig in his biography of Montaigne.

In his biography of Montaigne, Stefan Zweig illustrates him as someone who simply wanted to retreat to his tower and read in peace after a life of courtship and tirelessly working to please others. Montaigne believed in the profound energy of books, the ability they have to connect us to anyone or anyplace in history. To him, reading wasn’t about memorizing facts and dates to appear scholarly to others.

Rather, it is the human and emotional element contained in the book.
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