The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

Fate can send our dykes and ramparts a-toppling arse over tip; moreover I find that need, for a thousand diverse reasons, can make a home with those who have possessions as often as with those who have none; she is even perhaps less troublesome when she dwells with us alone than when we meet her accompanied by all our riches.

it seems to me that a rich man who is worried, busy and under necessary obligations is more wretched than a man who is simply poor.

[Poverty amidst riches is the most grievous form of want.]

When you tot it all up, there is more trouble in keeping money than in acquiring it.

You go on making your pile bigger, increasing it from one sum to another until, like a peasant, you deprive yourself of the enjoyment of your own goods: your enjoyment consists in hoarding and never actually using it. [C] If this is ‘using’ money, then the richest in cash are the guards on the walls and gates of a goodly city! To my way of thinking, any man with money is a miser.

I live from day to day, pleased to be able to satisfy my present, ordinary needs: extraordinary ones could never be met by all the provision in the world.

And it is madness to expect that Fortune will ever supply us with enough weapons to use against herself. We have to fight with our own weapons: fortuitous ones will let us down at the crucial moment.

[The fruit of riches consists in abundance: abundance is shown by having enough.]

Blessed is the man who has ordered his needs to so just a measure that his riches suffice them without worrying him or taking up his time, and without the spending and the gathering breaking into his other pursuits which are quiet, better suited and more to his heart.

So ease or indigence depend on each man’s opinion: wealth, fame and health all have no more beauty and pleasure than he who has them lends to them. [C] For each man good or ill is as he finds.

The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so but he who believes he is so: in that way alone does belie...

Neither good nor ill is done to us by Fortune: she merely offers us the matter and the seeds: our soul, more powerful than she is, can mould it or sow them as she pleases, being the only cause...

Whatever comes to us from outside takes its savour and its colour from our internal attributes, just as our garments warm us not with their heat but ours...

Things are not all that painful nor harsh in themselves: it is our weakness, our slackness, which makes them so.

To judge great and lofty things we need a mind which is like them: otherwise we attribute to them the viciousness which belongs to ourselves. A straight oar seems bent in water. It is not only seeing which counts: how we see counts too.71

[As much in pain as in pleasure, our opinions are trivial and womanish: we have been melted and dissolved by wantonness; we cannot even endure the sting of a bee without making a fuss. Above all we must gain mastery over ourselves.]

No one suffers long, save by his own fault.

always to bring those with whom I am talking back to the subjects they know best.

[The lumbering ox yearns for the saddle: the nag yearns for the plough.]3 [C] Follow that way and nobody achieves anything worthwhile. [A] So we should always lead4 architects, painters, cobblers and so on to talk of their own business.

Nevertheless we should consider on the other hand that so strict an obedience is appropriate only to precise orders previously given.

It is fear that I am most afraid of.

happiness in life (depending as it does on the tranquillity and contentment of a spirit well-born and on the resolution and assurance of an ordered soul) may never be attributed to any man until we have seen him act out the last scene in his play, which is indubitably the hardest.

In all the rest he can wear an actor’s mask: those fine philosophical arguments may be only a pose, or whatever else befalls us may not assay us to the quick, allowing us to keep our countenance serene. But in that last scene played between death and ourself there is no more feigning; we must speak straightforward French; we must show whatever is good and clean in the bottom of the pot:

[Only then are true words uttered from deep in our breast. The mask is ripped off: reality remains.]

The assay of the fruits of my studies is postponed unto death. Then we shall see if my arguments come from my lips or my heart.

I note that several men by their death have given a good or bad reputation to their entire life.

A man is quite unworthy of an acquaintance with virtue who weighs her fruit against the price she exacts; he knows neither her graces nor her ways.

one of virtue’s main gifts is a contempt for death,

if the worse comes to worse, we can sheer off the bung of our misfortunes whenever we like: death can end them.9 But, as for death itself, that is inevitable.

[All of our lots are shaken about in the Urn, destined sooner or later to be cast forth, placing us in everlasting exile via Charon’s boat.]

[He inquires about the way; he counts the days; the length of his life is the length of those roads. He is tortured by future anguish.]

If death frightens us how can we go one step forward without anguish? For ordinary people the remedy is not to think about it; but what brutish insensitivity can produce so gross a blindness? They lead the donkey by the tail:

Everybody goes out as though he had just come in. [A] Moreover, however decrepit a man may be, he thinks he still has another [C] twenty years [A] to go17

When there pass before our eyes examples such as these, so frequent and so ordinary, how can we ever rid ourselves of thoughts of death or stop imagining that death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment?

It is enough for me to spend my time contentedly. I deal myself the best hand I can, and then accept it.

They come and they go and they trot and they dance: and never a word about death. All well and good. Yet when death does come – to them, their wives, their children, their friends – catching them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair! Have you ever seen anything brought so low, anything so changed, so confused? We must start providing for it earlier.

we must learn to stand firm and to fight it. To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death. At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects.

In the midst of joy and feasting let our refrain be one which recalls our human condition. Let us never be carried away by pleasure so strongly that we fail to recall occasionally how many are the ways in which that joy of ours is subject to death or how many are the fashions in which death threatens to snatch it away.

[Believe that each day was the last to shine on you. If it comes, any unexpected hour will be welcome indeed.]

We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

Life has no evil for him who has thoroughly understood that loss of life is not an evil.

At first it does seem impossible not to feel the sting of such ideas, but if you keep handling them and running through them you eventually tame them.

As far as we possibly can we must always have our boots on, ready to go; above all we should take care to have no outstanding business with anyone else.

[They never add, that desire for such things does not linger on in your remains!]

Our graveyards have been planted next to churches, says Lycurgus, so that women, children and lesser folk should grow accustomed to seeing a dead man without feeling terror, and so that this continual spectacle of bones, tombs and funerals should remind us of our human condition:

I have adopted the practice of always having death not only in my mind but on my lips. There is nothing I inquire about more readily than how men have died: what did they say? How did they look? What expression did they have? There are no passages in the history books which I note more attentively. [C]

When a soldier of Caesar’s guard, broken and worn out, came up to him in the street and begged leave to kill himself, Caesar looked at his decrepit bearing and said with a smile: ‘So you think you are still alive, then?’

When our bodies are bent and stooping low they have less strength for supporting burdens. So too for our souls: we must therefore educate and train them for their encounter with that adversary, death; for the soul can find no rest while she remains afraid of him.

Death is inevitable: does it matter when it comes? When Socrates was told that the Thirty Tyrants had condemned him to death, he retorted, ‘And nature, them!’

How absurd to anguish over our passing into freedom from all anguish. Just as our birth was the birth of all things for us, so our death will be the death of them all.