Michel de Montaigne, Essays
Montaigne, a man before his time
I found Michel de Montaigne to be one of the most interesting people I’ve ever read. He’s an anthropologist, a philosopher, a man of deep faith, and he can write about taboo subjects while walking the finest lines of acceptability. He prolifically quotes my favorites of the Ancients and mashes them together with his own thoughts and observations in a superbly entertaining way. If you want to start reading him, you can get a taste of the essay contents in my quote below.
Michel de Montaigne (1533 –1592 and contemporary to Shakespeare) was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre with his work merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight. Sometimes called “the French Seneca,” Montaigne directly influenced numerous Western writers; his massive volume Essais, which I read, contains some of the most influential essays ever written.
“During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that "I am myself the matter of my book" was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne came to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt that began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, ''Que sçay-je?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; now rendered as "Que sais-je?" in modern French).” Wikipedia
He writes of a perspective of the Reformation as a Catholic but also as a philosopher. I found his concerns about the deconstruction of tradition to be applicable to my concerns of the philosophical impact of this movement in my own lifetime. It made me smile knowing it would be ok but also grieve over what will be lost.
I took the time to type these quotes out from my journal entries during last December’s weeklong silence retreat (yurt in the mountains) hoping you might benefit by meditating on them as I have. Because they’re from my journal, they’re poorly cited, but they are deeply personal, so I hope that makes up for it. Enjoy and drop a line in the comments of your favorites below if you don’t mind.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays: Matt’s favorite quotes
All vices are less weighty in the open and more pernicious when they hide under an appearance of soundness- Seneca
Reason and sense remove anxiety, not villas that look upon the sea- Horace
Unless the heart is purged, what must we undergo? What battles and what perils, to our fruitless woe! How great the bitter cares of lust that rend apart, with terrors in their train, an agitated heart! What ruin, what disasters, follow in the path of pride, and lust, and luxury and sloth, and wrath! -Lucretius
In solitude be to thyself a throng- Tibullus
Who does not willingly exchange health, rest, and life for reputation and glory, the most useless, worthless, and false coin that is current among us?- Michel de Montaigne , Essays on Solitude
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself. Michel de Montagne, Essays on Solitude
To saunter silent through the wholesome wood, bent on thoughts worthy of the wise and good.- Horace
Seek no longer that the world should speak of you, but how you should speak to yourself. Retire into yourself, but first prepare to receive yourself there; it would be madness to trust in yourself if you do now know how to govern yourself. There are ways to fail in solitude as well as in company. Until you have made yourself so that you dare not trip up in your own presence, and until you feel both shame and respect for yourself, let true ideals be kept before your mind.- Michel de Montaigne, Essays on Solitude
Grief for something lost and fear of losing it amount to the same thing- Seneca
Locked places invite the thief. The burglar passes by what is open- Seneca
And if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.- Michel de Montaigne, Essays on Books
I seek books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me how to die well and live well.- Montaigne, Essays on Books
Man can never plan fully to avoid what any hour may bring- Horace
Look on each day as if it were your last, and each unlooked-for hour will seem a boom.-Horace
It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint. There is nothing evil in life for the man who has thoroughly grasped that to be deprived of life is not an evil.- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to learn to Die
Whatever can be done another day can be done today- Michel de Montaigne To Philosophize is to learn to Die
No man is frailer than another, no man certain of the morrow- Seneca
Why aim so stoutly at so many things in our short life?- Horace
When death comes, let it find me at my work.- Ovid
I want a man to act, and to prolong the functions of life as long as he can and I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death and still more of my unfinished garden.- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to learn to Die
He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to learn to Die
Things often appear greater to us at a distance than near.- Julius Caesar
Our religion has no surer human foundation than contempt for life. Not only do the arguments of reason invite us to it; for why should we fear to lose a thing which once lost cannot be regretted? And since we are threatened by so many kinds of death, is there not more pain in fearing them all than in enduring one? - Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to learn to Die
What stupidity to torment ourselves about passing into exemption from all torment!- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to learn to Die
It is as foolish to weep about not being alive a hundred years from now as it is to lament that we were not alive a hundred years ago.- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to learn to Die
Nothing can be grievous that happens only once. Is it reasonable to fear a thing so short? Long life and short life are made one by death, for there is no long or short for things that are no more.- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to learn to Die
Death is the condition of your own creation; it is a part of you. You are fleeing from your own selves.- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to learn to Die
Death is to be feared less than nothing, if there is anything less than nothing. For us far less a thing must death be thought, if outght there be that can be less than nought.- Lucretius
Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years for you to have lived enough. Did you not think you would arrive at where you never ceased going? Yet there is no road but has its end.- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to Learn to Die
Neither men, nor their lives, is measured by the ell (yard).- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to learn to Die
The hour which gave us life led to its end- Seneca
Even in birth we die, the end is there from the start.- Manilius
It does not concern you dead or alive; alive because you are; dead because you are no more.- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to Learn to Die
No one dies before his time. The time which you leave behind was no more yours than that which passed before your birth, and it concerns you no more. - Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to Learn to Die
“Look back and see how pas eternities of time are nothing to us”- Lucretius
Does not everything move with your movement? Is there anything that does not grow old with you? A thousand men, a thousand animals, and a thousand other creatures die at the very moment when you die.- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to learn to Die
No night has ever followed day, no day the night, that has not heard, amid the newborn infants' squalls, the wild laments that go with death and funerals.- Lucretius
No night has ever followed day, no day the night. - Lucretius
Imagine honestly how much less bearable and more painful to man would be an everlasting life than the life given him. If you did not have death, you would curse me (God) incessantly for having deprived you of it. I have deliberately mixed with it (life) a little bitterness to keep you, seeing the convenience of it (death) to keep you from embracing it (death) too greedily and intemperately. To lodge you in a moderate state that I (God) ask of you, of neither fleeting life nor fleeing back from death, I have tempered both of them between sweetness and bitterness.- Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to Learn to Die
Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue but reveals it. All days travel towards death, the last one reveals it. -Michel de Montaigne, To Philosophize is to Learn to Die
But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk in plain French, we must show what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot. “At last true words surge up from deep within the breast! The mask is snatched away, reality left”.- Lucretius; Michel de Montaigne, That Our Happiness Must not be Judged Until after our Death
“Men, says an old Greek maxim, are tormented by the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves.”- Michel De Montaigne: That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them
Pyrrho the philosopher, being one day in a boat in a great tempest, showed the most frightened among his companions a pig that was there not at all concerned at this storm, and encouraged them by its example. Shall we then dare to say that this advantage, reason, that we make such a fuss about, and on account of which we think ourselves masters and emperors of the rest of creation, has been put in us for our torment? What good is the knowledge of things if by it we lose the repose and tranquility we should enjoy without it, and if it puts us into a cntd: worse condition than Pyrrho’s Pig? The intelligence that has been given us for our greatest good, shall we use it for our ruin, combatting the plan of nature and the universal order of things, which says that each man shall use his tools and means for his advantage? - Michel De Montaigne: That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them
The past or future, nought of it is now-La Boetie
Death holds less pain than does the wait for death- Ovid
Death is not an evil unless that which follows it is. – St. Augustine
Courage is greedy of danger- Seneca
There is more joy in virtue when tis’ hardest won- Lucan
“If heavy, short; if long, light”-- Cicero on pain/illness
“Remember that death ends the greatest ills, that the small ones have many intervals of respite, and that we are masters of the moderate ones; so that if they are bearable we shall bear them; if not, we can leave life as we leave the theatre when the play ceases to please us” - Cicero
What makes us endure pain so poorly is that we are not accustomed to find our principle contentment in the soul and that we do not concentrate enough on it; for the soul is the one and only mistress of our condition and conduct… The soul can be shaped into all varieties of forms and molds itself and to its every condition the feelings of the body and all other accidents. Therefore we must study the soul and look into it and awaken its all-powerful springs.-
That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them
, Michel de Montaigne
There is no reason, prescription of might that has power against its inclination and its (the soul) choice, out of the many thousands of attitudes at its disposal, let us give it one conducive to our repose and preservation, and we shall not only be sheltered from all harm but even gratified and flattered, if it please, by ills and pains. The soul profits from everything without distinction. -
That the Taste for Good and Evil Depends in Great Measure upon the Opinion We Have of Them Michel de Montaigne
They have suffered just so much as they have given into pain.- St Augustine
Never could custom conquer nature, for it is invincible; but we have corrupted our soul with shaded ease, luxuries, idleness, languor, sloth; we have softened it by evil opinions and habits.- Cicero
Whence it is understood that grief lies not in nature, but in opinion.- Cicero
Fortune is glass, it shatters when it shines.- Publius Syrus
Riches come rather from management than from revenue. “Each man is the maker of his fortune” (Sallust). And more wretched to me seems an uneasy hardup, over-busy rich man, than he who is simply poor. “They are poor in the midst of riches, which is the worst kind of poverty” Seneca.- That the Taste for Good and Evil Depends in Great Measure upon the Opinion We Have of Them Michel de Montaigne
Not to be covetous is money, not to be avid is revenue.- Cicero
The fruit of riches is abundance and sufficiency declares abundance.- Cicero
Confidence in the goodness of others is no slight testimony to one’s own goodness; and so God greatly favors it. - That the Taste for Good and Evil Depends in Great Measure upon the Opinion We Have of Them Michel de Montaigne
Each man is as well or as badly off as he thinks he is.- That the Taste for Good and Evil Depends in Great Measure upon the Opinion We Have of Them Michel de Montaigne
Not the man of whom it is thought, but the one who thinks it of himself, is happy. And by just this fact belief gains reality and truth.- That the Taste for Good and Evil Depends in Great Measure upon the Opinion We Have of Them Michel de Montaigne
Things are not painful or difficult in themselves; it is our weakness and cowardness that make them so. To judge of great and lofty things we need a soul of the same caliber. Otherwise, we attribute them to the vice that is our own. A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it. - That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them, Michel de Montaigne
If is not bad to live in need, at least there is no need to live in need. - That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them, Michel de Montaigne
No one suffers long except by his own fault.- That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them, Michel de Montaigne
He who has not the courage to suffer either death or life, who will neither resist of flee, what can we do with him?- That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them, Michel de Montaigne
Wisdom has its excesses and has no less need of moderation than folly.- Virgil
Mingle a dash of folly with your wisdom.- Horace
And nothing that is hard can a sick mind endure.- Ovid
Anything cracked will shatter at a touch– Ovid
Why does no one confess his vices? Because he is still in the grip now; it is only for a waking man to tell his dreams– Seneca