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If I can, I will prevent my death from saying anything not first said by my life.
I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.
Whenever I ask a certain acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about anything, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of scab and of arse.
So too with human beings; it is not much trouble to plant them, but as soon as they are born we take on in order to form them and bring them up a diversity of cares, full of bustle and worry.
Omits the problems and traumas of pregnancy and childbirth!
Ah! But they wear no breeches…
among all the amorous adventures which they credit him with, there is not one, I think, where he appears in might and majesty.
Semele died because Jupiter appeared to her in the glory he showed to his goddess wife Juno.
One of my neighbouring gentlemen, when listing the superiorities of former times over our own, did not forget to mention the proud and magnificent names of the noblemen in those days; by simply hearing names such as Don Grumedan, Quedragan or Agesilan, he felt they had been men of a different kind than our Pierres, Guillots and Michels.
Our powers are no more capable of competing with them in vice than in virtue, both of which derive from a vigour of mind which was incomparably greater in them than in us: the weaker the souls, the less able they are to do anything really good or really bad.
and it seems to me that, according to our deserts, we can never be despised enough.
we are not so much wicked as daft; we are not so much full of evil as of inanity;
he asked him whether he was better at wrestling than Pericles: ‘That,’ Thucydides replied, ‘would be hard to prove: for after I have thrown him to the ground in the match he persuades the spectators that he did not have a fall and is declared the winner.’
Countries such as Crete and Sparta which maintained themselves in a sound and regulated polity did not rate orators very highly.
This could alternatively be phrased: "Totalitarian states persecute demagogues."
In his Laws, Plato lists three kinds of belief which are insulting to the gods: that there are none; that they do not concern themselves with our affairs; that they never refuse to answer our prayers, oblations and sacrifices.
however short his repentance fear itself would force him to cast his mind back to it, making him thenceforth master of those bloated vices which were habitually his.
Not how addiction works - including sex addiction.
Now I learned as a fact that both before and after this event she was quite wanton and not all that hard to get.
Montaigne sees a paradox in a sexually liberated woman who is determined not to be raped.
Vices are all the same in that they are vices – and doubtless the Stoics understand matters after that fashion: but even though they are equally vices they are not equal vices.
she was so deeply and provocatively asleep that he had been able to have her without waking her up.
So it was not rape because she was "provocatively" asleep? Hmmm.
Of all the violences done to the conscience the one most to be avoided, it seems to me, is violence against the chastity of women, since an element of bodily pleasure is naturally in it for them. For this reason their resistance cannot be abolutely complete and it would seem that the rape may be mingled with a kind of willingness.
Did he really just say that an element of bodily pleasure is naturally there for the woman during rape?
6. On practice
Near death experience
Every man knows from his own experience that he has a part of his body which often stirs, erects and lies down again without his leave.
somebody else’s I knowledge
Read "somebody else's knowledge"
Few devotees of poetry would not have been more gratified at fathering the Aeneid than the fairest boy in Rome, nor fail to find the loss of one more bearable than the other.
Virgil wanted The Aeneid burnt after his death, which rather contradicts Montaigne's point.
I note that several virtues – chastity, sobriety and temperance – can come to us as our bodies grow weaker.
when Dionysius the Tyrant presented him with three beautiful young women to choose from, he said he would choose all three, since things had gone badly for Paris when he preferred one woman to her two companions:
ichneumon,
Could mean a wasp but I think Egyptian mongoose is more likely.
[That does not demand a cunt descended from some great consul.]
Men who cannot read do not find it harder to get an erection, do they?]
the wise man has only one superior – Jupiter – and is rich, free, honourable, beautiful, the king of kings in fact… especially when well and not troubled by snot!]
so much so that when they say ‘I doubt’, you can jump down their throats and make them admit that they at least know one thing for certain, namely that they doubt.
Did Descartes get the idea from here?
if all the faculties of the soul are so completely changed that no memory of the past remains, that seems to me to be no different from extinction.]
if a man has lived well he joins the star to which he is assigned; if badly, he becomes a woman;
Provided that a writer of almanacs has already gained enough authority for people to bother to read his books, examining his words for implications and shades of meaning, he can be made to say anything whatever – like Sybils.
Nostradamus overlapped with Montaigne.
Who has ever seen an old man who did not praise former times and condemn the present, loading on to the world the weight of his own wretchedness and on to the manners of men his own melancholy!
the virtue of moderation is rarer than that of endurance.
the French are like monkeys which go scrambling up a tree from branch to branch, never ceasing until they reach the top; then, once they are there, they show you their arses.
women get angry only to make us angry in turn,
I don't think that's true!
If only I were like that dreamer in Cicero who dreamed he had a woman in his arms and had the faculty of ejaculating his gallstone in the bedclothes!7 My own gallstones monstrously unlecher me!
the patient must first trust in the remedy with firm hope and assurance before it can work effectively.
Placebo / nocebo effect
There is no great harm done if we miscalculate the height of the sun or the fractions in some astronomical computation:
Tell that to the shipwrecked sailors!
those degraded men, Public Executioners of High Justice – an office as useful as it is shameful.
No one but you knows whether you are base and cruel, or loyal and dedicated.
Is even this true? Plenty of moral people are obsessed by their own moral failings while plenty of evil people think their actions are only to be praised.
that man regards theft as a dishonest deed; and he hates it… less than he hates poverty.
friendship is a companiable, not a gregarious, beast.
When the daughters of the Brahmans have nothing else to commend them, the town-crier calls the people together in the market-place expressly for them to show off their organs of matrimony to see whether they at least can be worth a husband to them.)
Naked Attraction?
Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them.
no lady who had not been tempted could boast of her chastity.
Great heroes lived before Agamemnon; many they were, yet none is lamented, being swept away unknown into the long night.]
we vainly conclude today that the world is declining into decrepitude using arguments drawn from our own decline and decadence
Our world has just discovered another one: and who will answer for its being the last of its brothers,
Montaigne didn't know about Australasia!
during the fifteenth of which was created a man and a woman who remade the human race. Ten years later, on a particular day which they observe, the sun appeared, newly created;
Howcould the humans survive 10 years without a sun?
