Collected Thoughts: Meditations on Life in the 21st Century

Reader, you have here an honest book; it does at the outset forewarn you that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all either to your service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my family and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and temperament, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of me. Had my intention been to seek the world's favor, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties: I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in my own genuine, simple, and ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint. My defects are therein to be read to the life, and any imperfections and my natural form, so far as public reverence has permitted me. If I had lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature's primitive laws, I assure you I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully and quite naked. Thus, reader, I myself am the matter of my book; there is no reason you should employ your leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore, farewell.

--Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French philosopher and essayist, Essays, June 12, 1580