Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Better a head well made than a head well filled.”
Michel de Montaigne · Renaissance humanism · Renaissance · 1580
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the sentence as a preference for judgement over storage: a mind that can weigh is better than a mind that only retains. He is criticising an education that stuffs children with other people's sentences and calls the result learning. A rival reading hears a contempt for knowledge itself, as if facts were an embarrassment, which the essay does not say. The line sits in the essay on the education of children, where he wants a tutor to form a capacity rather than to decorate a memory.
Did Michel de Montaigne really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. M. A. Screech's English of the essay on educating children, book one, chapter 26. Donald Frame's version is also standard. Montaigne is advising how to form a judgement, not how to hoard quotations. The French is his. This wording is a translation.
Where it comes from
Essays I.26
Approximate date: 1580.
How to use it
A pupil in a Manchester sixth form can recite a page of a set text and still be unable to say whether the page's argument survives a counterexample. Montaigne's preference would spend the next lesson on that test, not on another page memorised for the mock. A full head is not worthless in the essay; It is worthless as a substitute for a head that can use what it holds.
A mindset reading
The slogan is easy to turn against study, which is the opposite of a writer who covered his library walls with quotations. He wants the quotations digested into judgement, not banned. A rival use praises ignorance as authenticity; He is praising a formed capacity, which is more work than either cramming or refusing to read.
Understand the philosophy
The essay on educating children is a Renaissance argument about tutors, travel, and the point of letters. The key term is a well-made head, a judgement trained to try claims, set against a well-filled head that can only repeat them. Screech's translation is the English this library follows for the Essays. The French sentence is Montaigne's, and it is advice to a noble mother about her son, not a sneer at scholarship.
- knowledge
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the sentence as a preference for judgement over storage: a mind that can weigh is better than a mind that only retains. He is criticising an education that stuffs children with other people's sentences and calls the result learning. A rival reading hears a contempt for knowledge itself, as if facts were an embarrassment, which the essay does not say. The line sits in the essay on the education of children, where he wants a tutor to form a capacity rather than to decorate a memory.
Did Michel de Montaigne really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. M. A. Screech's English of the essay on educating children, book one, chapter 26. Donald Frame's version is also standard. Montaigne is advising how to form a judgement, not how to hoard quotations. The French is his. This wording is a translation.
Which work is it in?
Essays I.26 Approximate date: 1580.