How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell

If you spoke well, you must be able to think well.

It is depressing to be rejected, he said, but even worse to be accepted out of pity.

“Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it.”

“We are in almost all things unjust judges of their actions, as they are of ours.”

Only when civilization makes man “sociable and a slave” does he lose his manliness, learning to be weak and to fear everything around him. He also learns despair: no one ever heard of a “free savage” killing himself, says Rousseau.

“The archer who overshoots the target misses as much as the one who does not reach it.”

For him, people who try to rise above the human manage only to sink to the subhuman.

Young people crave beliefs; they want to be roused.

Freedom is the only rule, and digression is the only path.