I've come to realise that I probably never will stop writing about this subject.

The following short quote on Michel de Montaigne's importance to those reading his texts from the 1500s, which is culled from Sarah Bakewell's absolutely astounding and supremely recommendable book titelled "How To Live: A Life Of Montaigne", says so much of how much Montaigne's "essays" mean to people, even though hundreds of years have passed since Montaigne's death:

Tabourot des Accords, said that anyone reading the Essays felt as if they themselves had written it. Over two hundred and fifty years later, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said the same thing in almost the same phrase. “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life.” “So much have I made him my own,” wrote the twentieth-century novelist André Gide, “that it seems he is my very self.” And Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer on the verge of suicide after being forced into exile during the Second World War, found in Montaigne his only real friend: “Here is a ‘you’ in which my ‘I’ is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished.” The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead. “Four hundred years disappear like smoke.”

The following are quotes from the introduction to Bakewell's book