How to Live Quotes

“If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry;”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“As the modern critic David Quint has summed it up, Montaigne would probably interpret the message for humanity in Christ’s crucifixion as being “Don’t crucify people.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“And he believed that, by nature, ‘males and females are cast in the same mould’. He was very conscious of the double standard used to judge male and female sexual behaviour. Aristotle notwithstanding, Montaigne suspected that women had the same passions and needs as men, yet they were condemned far more when they indulged them. His usual perspective-shifting habits also made it apparent to him that his view of women must be as partial and unreliable as women’s views of men. His feelings on the whole subject are encapsulated in his observation: ‘We are in almost all things unjust judges of their actions, as they are of ours.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

“The twenty-first century has everything to gain from a Montaignean sense of life, and, in its most troubled moments so far, it has been sorely in need of a Montaignean politics. It could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgment, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict. It needs his conviction that no vision of heaven, no imagined Apocalypse, and no perfectionist fantasy can ever outweigh the tiniest of selves in the real world. It is unthinkable to Montaigne that one could ever “gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“It plays a role like that of the mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s novel Island, which are trained to fly around all day calling “Attention! Attention!” and “Here and now!”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own … Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Montaigne, Philosopher of Life: How to Believe

“And Montaigne had long since learned that much of what passed for passionate public commitment was just showing off. People involve themselves because they want to have an air of consequence, or to advance their private interests, or simply to keep busy so that they don’t have to think about life.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“Mediocrity, for Montaigne, does not mean the dullness that comes from not bothering to think things through, or from lacking the imagination to see beyond one’s own viewpoint. It means accepting that one is like everyone else, and that one carries the entire form of the human condition.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“must make it.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“I do not portray being,” he wrote, “I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another … but from”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there. You die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“Epicurean writer Lucretius suggested picturing yourself at the point of death, and considering two possibilities. Either you have lived well, in which case you can go your way satisfied, like a well-fed guest leaving a party. Or you have not, but then it makes no difference that you are losing your life, since you obviously did not know what to do with it anyway.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“Montaigne and Shakespeare have each been held up as the first truly modern writers, capturing that distinctive modern sense of being unsure where you belong, who you are, and what you are expected to do. The Shakespearean scholar J. M. Robertson believed that all literature since these two authors could be interpreted as an elaboration of their joint theme: the discovery of self-divided consciousness.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“If you don’t know how to die,13 don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

“It is epokhe all the way.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“he presented himself as floating through the world on a blanket of benevolent vacancy.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“life does not pause to remind you that it is running out. The only one who can keep you mindful of this is you: It”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“The world was a cosmic wobble: a shimmy.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

“just look around you and interest yourself in the variety and sublimity of things. Salvation lies in paying full attention14 to nature.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

“Moreover, in 1900, the freedom of the individual hardly seemed to require defense. “Had not all that long ago become a self-evident matter, guaranteed by law and custom to a humanity long since liberated from tyranny and serfdom?” Zweig’s generation—he was born in 1881—assumed that prosperity and personal freedom would just keep growing. Why should things go backwards? No one felt that civilization was in danger; no one had to retreat into their private selves to preserve their spiritual freedom.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“I have seen no more evident monstrosity10 and miracle in the world than myself. We become habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

“Montaigne’s circumscribed sense of where his duty lay became most apparent in June 1585, when Bordeaux suffered a heat wave rapidly followed by an outbreak of plague: a particularly destructive combination. The epidemic lasted until December, and during those few months more than 14,000 people died in the city, almost a third of its population. More people were killed than in the St. Bartholomew’s massacres across the whole country, yet, as often happens with epidemics occurring in time of war, it left little trace on historical memory. In any case, plague was common. So frequent were outbreaks in the sixteenth century that it is easy to forget how catastrophic they were, each time, for those unfortunate enough to be caught up in them.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“In an essay almost entirely about sex, Montaigne cites the wisdom of Aristotle: “A man … should touch his wife prudently and soberly, lest if he caresses her too lasciviously the pleasure should transport her outside the bounds of reason.” The physicians warned, too, that excessive pleasure could make sperm curdle inside the woman’s body, rendering her unable to conceive. It was better for the husband to bestow ecstasy elsewhere, where it did not matter what damage it caused. “The kings of Persia,” relates Montaigne, “used to invite their wives to join them at their feasts; but when the wine began to heat them in good earnest and they had to give completely free rein to sensuality, they sent them back to their private rooms.” They then brought on a more suitable set of women.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“In 1452, Leon Battista Alberti recommended in his De re aedificatoria (On Building), “The husband and wife must have separate bedrooms, not only to ensure that the husband be not disturbed by his wife, when she is about to give birth or is ill, but also to allow them, even in summer, an uninterrupted night’s sleep.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“All I know is that I know nothing.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

“Writing made him live differently. "In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape." It made him take more care over life, and pay more attention. Others looked ahead; he looked within. "I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Montaigne, Philosopher of Life: How to Believe

“Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.”
― Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer