John Florio

His candid self-acceptance influenced generations of later writers and thinkers, who found in him a model of honesty about the mixed human condition.

Shakespeare read him—or at least read his translator, John Florio—and there are echoes of Montaigne in Hamlet and The Tempest and elsewhere: the same fascination with human inconsistency, the same gentle humor about human folly, the same refusal to reduce the complexity of the self to a single moral judgment.

Emerson called him "the frankest and honestest of all writers" and devoted an entire essay to celebrating his candor.

Nietzsche admired his ability to write about himself without vanity or false modesty.