Michel de Montaigne

“ What a marvellous example of this, divine wisdom has given us, which, to ensure the salvation Of the human race, and to conduct its glorious victory over death and sin, chose to do this only under sufferance of our political system, and subjected its progress and the guidance toward so high and so salutary a result to the blindness and injustice of our observances and usages, allowing the innocent blood to flow of so many of the elect, its beloved, and permitting the loss of long years in the ripening of this inestimable fruit! ”

“ If things are surrendered to us, why should we not make use of them, or adapt them to our benefit? If that which we call evil and affliction is neither evil nor affliction in itself, but our imagination alone gives it that character, it is in our power to change it; and having the choice, if nothing compels us, we are strangely unwise to exert ourselves for the side which is most painful for us, [5] and to give to disease, poverty, and contumely a bitter and bad taste if we can give them a good one, and if, fortune simply supplying matter, it is for us to give it shape. ”

“ I believe, truly, that it is the fear-inspiring visages and paraphernalia with which we surround death which frighten us more than the thing itself: a wholly new form of life, the outcries of mothers, wives, and children, the visits of surprised and grief-stricken friends, the presence of a number of pale-faced, weeping servants, a darkened room, lighted candles, our bedside besieged by physicians and preachers — in short, all about us horror and dismay. Lo, we are already shrouded and interred. Children are afraid even of their friends when they see them masked ”

“ Were we to fall into it suddenly, I do not think that we should be capable of enduring such a change; but, led by her [77] hand, down a gentle and, as it were, imperceptible descent, little by little, step by step, she impels us into that wretched state and enures us to it, so that we feel no shock when our youth dies in us, which is essentially and in truth a sterner death than is the utter death of a languishing life, and than is death in old age; because the leap from half-existence to non-existence is not so great as from a pleasant and flourishing existence to a painful and grievous one. ”

“ There are some who, from terror, anticipate the hand of the executioner; and he who was unbound that his pardon might be read to him, was found stark dead on the scaffold solely from the stroke of his imagination. We sweat, we tremble, we turn pale, and we blush at the assaults of our imagination, and, sunk in a feather-bed, feel our bodies shaken by their commotion, sometimes even to death. ”

“ We are in the wrong in thinking that its troubles serve as a spur and seasoning to its sweetness, — as in nature one contrary is vivified by another, — and in saying, when we come to virtue, that similar consequences and difficulties over-burden her and make her austere and inaccessible; whereas much more quickly than in earthly delight, they ennoble, intensify, and heighten the divine and perfect pleasure which she brings us. ”

“ How often we see common people, when led forth to death, — and not to a simple death, but to one accompanied by disgrace and sometimes by grievous suffering, — face it with such confidence, some from stubbornness and some from natural shallowness, that we can detect no change from their ordinary frame of mind: arranging their domestic affairs, commending themselves to their friends, singing, haranguing, and talking with the populace, nay, sometimes even cracking jokes, and drinking to their acquaintances, as if they were Socrates. ”

“ The same cause that animates the male member animates also, without our choice, the heart, the lungs, and the pulse, the sight of a charming object imperceptibly diffusing within us the flame of a feverish emotion. Is it those muscles and those veins alone that rise and subside, without the consent, not only of our will, but even of our thought? We do not command our hair to stand on end and our skin to quiver with desire or with fear ”

“ And if it were not so, what would have brought courage and valour and strength and greatness of soul and resolution into good repute? How should they play their part if there were no pain to defy? Avida est periculi virtus. [34] If we have not to lie on the hard ground, to endure in complete armour the noon-day heat, to eat horse-flesh or that of an ass, to be hacked in pieces, to extract a bullet from among our bones, to be sewn up and cauterised and probed, whence shall we acquire the advantage that we desire to have over the common crowd? ”

“ The Essayist now contemplates the other ills of human life. “Very good,”” you will answer; “your precept is well enough for death: but what will you say of poverty? and what of pain?” He answers that with regard to pain, “Here it is not all imagination, ... I grant that it is the worst mischance of our being,” and that poverty is to be dreaded — but dreaded only — because it throws us into the arms of pain, by hunger and cold, thirst and heat. ”

“ It is no wonder that such an education produced results so admirable.
Men used to go to the other cities of Greece, it is said, in search of orators, painters, and musicians, but to Lacedæmon for legislators, magistrates, and generals; at Athens they learned to talk wisely, here to do wisely; there to extricate themselves from a sophistical argument and to frustrate the imposture of words craftily intertwined, here to extricate themselves from the allurements of pleasure and to frustrate with a high heart the threats of fortune and of death ”

“ Pyrrho’s pig is of our company here: he is unterrified by death, but if he is beaten, he squeals and squirms. Shall we run counter to the universal law of Nature, — which is seen in every living thing under the sky, — of trembling under pain? The very trees seem to groan at the injuries we inflict on them. Death is felt only through the reason, as it is the action of an instant. ”

“ To say the truth, I do not believe that such motions are made with intention; for what judgement can you form as to high or low aim in so sudden a matter? And it is much easier to believe that fortune smiled upon their fright, and that another time such action would be quite as likely to throw them in front of the blow as to avoid it. ”

“ Of the many thousand twists and turns she has at her command, let us make her take one conducive to our repose and preservation; then we are not only shielded from all harm, but even pleased and flattered, if it seems well to her, by hurts and ills. She turns every thing to her advantage, no matter what it is: error, dreams, are useful to her as legitimate material for making us secure and content.
It is easy to see that what gives an edge to pain and pleasure within us is our state of mind. ”

“ And I praise highly the fortune of an elderly prelate whom I know to have resigned his purse so completely, as to both receipts and expenditures, sometimes to one chosen servant, sometimes to another, that he has glided through many years in as great ignorance of his household affairs of that nature as any stranger. Confidence in another’s goodness is no slight testimony of one’s own goodness, therefore God freely favours it. ”

“ In truth, the effect of an affliction, if it be extreme, must wholly stun the mind and deprive it of freedom of action; as, on the startling alarm of some very ill news, it happens to us to feel dazed and deadened, and, as it were, completely paralysed, in such wise that the mind, upon giving way later to tears and lamentations, seems to relax and disperse itself, and take a wider sweep, more at its ease. ”

“ Even in our councils and our deliberations, it is certain that there is an admixture of chance and good luck; for all that our wisdom can do does not amount to much; the more keen and more alert it is, the more weakness it detects in itself, and distrusts itself so much the more. I am of Sylla’s opinion, [7] and when I scrutinise closely the most glorious exploits of war, I see, so it seems to me, that those who conduct them employ in them deliberation and advice only as a matter of form, and the larger part of the enterprise they abandon to fortune ”

“ Whence it comes about that we see those who are otherwise excellent men subject to this fault and enslaved by it. I have a nice fellow of a tailor whom I never hear tell the truth, not even when it would be useful to him. If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we should be better off, for we should take for certain the contrary of what the liar said. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field. The Pythagoreans regard good as certain and definite, evil as indefinite and uncertain. A thousand roads lead away from the goal, one leads to it. ”

“ We regard death, poverty, and pain as our chief enemies. Now this death, which some call the most horrible of horrible things — who does not know that others call it the only haven from the tempests of this life, the sovereign benefaction of nature, the sole stay of our liberty, and the universal and speedy remedy for all ills. ”

“ It is not in the most poignant and penetrating heat of the attack that we are in a fitting state to set forth our lamentations and our persuasions: the mind is then overloaded by intense thought and the body prostrated and languishing with love. ”

“ Therefore I have undertaken to say what I know how to say, accommodating the matter to my powers; if I should take a subject to be followed up, my measure might fall short of my topic; and were my liberty so free, I might publish opinions which, even according to my own judgement and to reason, are unlawful and punishable. Plutarch would readily acknowledge, concerning what he wrote, that it is due to others if his examples are wholly and always true; if they are profitable to posterity and presented with a brilliancy that lights our way to virtue, that is due to him. ”

“ I know not what good spirit most beneficially drove me out of it, like the Syracusan, and sent all that habit of saving to the winds, the pleasure of a certain very expensive journey having trampled underfoot that foolish fancy. Whence I have fallen into a third sort of existence (I say what I feel about it) , certainly much more agreeable and better regulated — which is, that I make my outgo run evenly with my income: sometimes one is in advance, sometimes the other, but they are never far apart. ”

“ Just as the enemy becomes fiercer when we fly, so pain grows proud to see us tremble before it. [45] It will surrender on much better terms to the man who shows it a bold front; we must resist it and brace ourselves against it. By being cornered and falling back, we invite and attract the destruction that threatens us. (c) As the body is steadier against the onset by stiffening its muscles, so is the soul. ”

“ I readily trust to the word of another, but I should be slow to do so when it could be thought that I had done it more from despair and lack of courage, than in freedom of spirit and from confidence in his loyalty. ”

“ I live from day to day, and content myself with having the wherewithal to supply my present and ordinary needs; as for the extraordinary ones, all the providing in the world would not suffice for them. (c) And it is madness to expect that Fortune herself ever arms us sufficiently against herself. It is with our own weapons that we must fight her. Haphazard weapons will betray us at the height of need. ”

“ We call physicians lucky when they attain some good result, as if there were no art but theirs which can not sustain itself unaided, and whose bases are too weak to be leaned on with its whole weight, and as if it alone needed to have chance and fortune lend a hand in its operations. ”

“ Whence it happens that there are two sorts of laws, in many respects very different — those of honour and those of justice: thus, the former condemn as strictly the lie tamely submitted to, as the latter do the lies revenged; by the decree of arms he is stripped of honour and nobility who submits to an insult, and by civil decree he who takes vengeance for it incurs a disgraceful punishment; he who appeals to the laws to obtain satisfaction for an offence to his honour, dishonours himself, and he who does not so appeal is punished and chastised by the laws. ”

“ It is a custom which affords peculiar advantages to those nations by which it is observed, and is desirable in the eyes of all good princes (c) who have cause to complain that the memory of bad princes is treated like their own. We owe submission and obedience equally to all kings, for those are due to the kingly office; but esteem, like affection, we owe to their virtue alone. Let us yield to political necessity so far as to endure them patiently when unworthy, to conceal their vices, to assist with our commendation their unimportant acts so long as their authority needs our support ”

“ My nature is to feel some pleasure in paying, as if I relieved my shoulders of an annoying burden and of that semblance of servitude; as I feel a pleasure that flatters me in doing a good action and pleasing another. ”

“ During our last wars in Milan, with so many captures and recaptures, the people, being made impatient by such perpetual alternations of fortune, so deliberately chose death, that I have heard my father say that he heard of as many as five-and-twenty heads of families who had made way with themselves in one week; an incident resembling that of the Xantians, who, besieged by Brutus, were seized pell-mell — men, women, and children — with so fierce a craving for death, that there is nothing done to escape death which they did not do to escape life ”

“ All other wives are burned at the obsequies of their husbands, not with fortitude simply, but gaily. And when the body of their deceased king is burned, all his wives and concubines, his favourites, and every sort of official and public servant, forming a great multitude, rush so light-heartedly to the fire, to throw themselves into it with the master, that they seem to regard it as a great honour to be his companions in death. ”