Essays of Michel de Montaigne

[“Howling, roaring, groaning with a thousand noises, expressing his torment in a dismal voice.” (Or:) “Wailing, complaining, groaning, murmuring much avail lugubrious sounds.”--Verses of Attius, in his Phaloctetes, quoted by Cicero, De Finib., ii. 29; Tusc. Quaes., ii. 14.]

Miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself Misfortunes that only hurt us by being known Mix railing, indiscretion, and fury in his disputations Moderation is a virtue that gives more work than suffering Modesty is a foolish virtue in an indigent person (Homer) More ado to interpret interpretations More books upon books than upon any other subject More brave men been lost in occasions of little moment More solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak More supportable to be always alone than never to be so More valued a victory obtained by counsel than by force Morosity and melancholic humour of a sour ill-natured pedant Most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency Most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit Most of my actions are guided by example, not by choice Mothers are too tender Motive to some vicious occasion or some prospect of profit Much better to offend him once than myself every day Much difference betwixt us and ourselves Must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves Must of necessity walk in the steps of another My affection alters, my judgment does not My books: from me hold that which I have not retained My dog unseasonably importunes me to play My fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it My humour is no friend to tumult My humour is unfit either to speak or write for beginners My innocence is a simple one; little vigour and no art My mind is easily composed at distance My reason is not obliged to bow and bend; my knees are My thoughts sleep if I sit still My words does but injure the love I have conceived within Natural death the most rare and very seldom seen Nature of judgment to have it more deliberate and more slow Nature of wit is to have its operation prompt and sudden Nature, who left us in such a state of imperfection Nearest to the opinions of those with whom they have to do Negligent garb, which is yet observable amongst the young men Neither be a burden to myself nor to any other Neither continency nor virtue where there are no opposing desire Neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell Neither the courage to die nor the heart to live Never any man knew so much, and spake so little Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing Never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions Never oppose them either by word or sign, how false or absurd Never represent things to you simply as they are Never spoke of my money, but falsely, as others do New World: sold it opinions and our arts at a very dear rate Nnone that less keep their promise(than physicians) No alcohol the night on which a man intends to get children No beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man No danger with them, though they may do us no good No doing more difficult than that not doing, nor more active No effect of virtue, to have stronger arms and legs No evil is honourable; but death is honourable No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness No great choice betwixt not knowing to speak anything but ill-- No man continues ill long but by his own fault No man is free from speaking foolish things No man more certain than another of to-morrow--Seneca No necessity upon a man to live in necessity No one can be called happy till he is dead and buried No other foundation or support than public abuse No passion so contagious as that of fear No physic that has not something hurtful in it No use to this age, I throw myself back upon that other No way found to tranquillity that is good in common Noble and rich, where examples of virtue are rarely lodged Nobody prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless Noise of arms deafened the voice of laws None of the sex, let her be as ugly as the devil thinks lovable Nor get children but before I sleep, nor get them standing Nor have other tie upon one another, but by our word Nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of my own Not a victory that puts not an end to the war Not being able to govern events, I govern myself Not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred Not certain to live till I came home Not conceiving things otherwise than by this outward bark Not conclude too much upon your mistress’s inviolable chastity Not for any profit, but for the honour of honesty itself Not having been able to pronounce one syllable, which is No!

The like madness does sometimes push on a whole multitude; for in one of the encounters that Germanicus had with the Germans, two great parties were so amazed with fear that they ran two opposite ways, the one to the same place from which the other had fled.--[Tacit, Annal., i.

This faggoting up of so many divers pieces is so done that I never set pen to paper but when I have too much idle time, and never anywhere but at home; so that it is compiled after divers interruptions and intervals, occasions keeping me sometimes many months elsewhere. As to the rest, I never correct my first by any second conceptions; I, peradventure, may alter a word or so, but ‘tis only to vary the phrase, and not to destroy my former meaning.

“The body with a little sting is griev’d, When the most perfect health is not perceiv’d, This only pleases me, that spleen nor gout Neither offend my side nor wring my foot; Excepting these, scarce any one can tell, Or e’er observes, when he’s in health and well.”

‘Tis a saying, “That death discharges us of all our obligations.” I know some who have taken it in another sense.

When wretched and dwarfish little souls cajole and deceive themselves, and think to spread their fame for having given right judgment in an affair, or maintained the discipline of the guard of a gate of their city, the more they think to exalt their heads the more they show their tails. This little well-doing has neither body nor life; it vanishes in the first mouth, and goes no further than from one street to another.

For my part, I seldom find myself agitated with surprises; I always find myself in my place, as heavy and unwieldy bodies do; if I am not at home, I am always near at hand; my dissipations do not transport me very far; there is nothing strange or extreme in the case; and yet I have sound and vigorous turns.

I am a Frenchman only through this great city, great in people, great in the felicity of her situation; but, above all, great and incomparable in variety and diversity of commodities: the glory of France, and one of the most noble ornaments of the world. May God drive our divisions far from her. Entire and united, I think her sufficiently defended from all other violences.

Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one’s ease: but men do not always take the right way. They often think they have totally taken leave of all business, when they have only exchanged one employment for another: there is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom. Wherever the mind is perplexed, it is in an entire disorder, and domestic employments are not less troublesome for being less important. Moreover, for having shaken off the court and the exchange, we have not taken leave of the principal vexations of life:

[“Do we not see them, uncertain what they want, and always asking for something new, as if they could get rid of the burthen.” --Lucretius, iii. 1070.]

By this method of instruction, my young pupil will be much more and better employed than his fellows of the college are. But as the steps we take in walking to and fro in a gallery, though three times as many, do not tire a man so much as those we employ in a formal journey, so our lesson, as it were accidentally occurring, without any set obligation of time or place, and falling naturally into every action, will insensibly insinuate itself.

I perceive that in these divisions wherein we are involved in France, every one labours to defend his cause; but even the very best of them with dissimulation and disguise: he who would write roundly of the true state of the quarrel, would write rashly and wrongly.

Such as hear me declare my ignorance in husbandry, whisper in my ear that it is disdain, and that I neglect to know its instruments, its seasons, its order, how they dress my vines, how they graft, and to know the names and forms of herbs and fruits, and the preparing the meat on which I live, the names and prices of the stuffs I wear, because, say they; I have set my heart upon some higher knowledge; they kill me in saying so.

I should willingly take Seneca’s word on the experience he made upon the like occasion, provided he would deal sincerely with me. The most honourable mark of goodness in such a necessity is freely to confess both one’s own faults and those of others; with the power of its virtue to stay one’s inclination towards evil; unwillingly to follow this propension; to hope better, to desire better.

Ut hymettia sole Cera remollescit, tractataque poll ice multas Vertitur in facies, ipsoque fit utilis usu;

This is what my memory presents to me in gross, and with uncertainty enough; all judgments in gross are weak and imperfect.

‘Twas a sudden whimsey, mixed with a little curiosity, that made me do a thing so contrary to my nature; for I am an enemy to all subtle and counterfeit actions, and abominate all manner of trickery, though it be for sport, and to an advantage; for though the action may not be vicious in itself, its mode is vicious.

What has become of the old precept, “That soldiers ought more to fear their chief than the enemy”?--[Valerius Maximus, Ext. 2.]--and of that wonderful example, that an orchard being enclosed within the precincts of a camp of the Roman army, was seen at their dislodgment the next day in the same condition, not an apple, though ripe and delicious, being pulled off, but all left to the possessor?

“There must be of necessity, we find, A nature that’s corporeal of the mind, Because we evidently see it smarts And wounded is with shafts the body darts;”

The senses are our first and proper judges, which perceive not things but by external accidents; and ‘tis no wonder, if in all the parts of the service of our society, there is so perpetual and universal a mixture of ceremonies and superficial appearances; insomuch that the best and most effectual part of our polities therein consist. ‘Tis still man with whom we have to do, of whom the condition is wonderfully corporal.

[“These things are so far reciprocal that if there be divination, there must be deities; and if deities, divination.”--Cicero, De Divin., i. 6.]

If what we call evil and torment is neither evil nor torment of itself, but only that our fancy gives it that quality, it is in us to change it, and it being in our own choice, if there be no constraint upon us, we must certainly be very strange fools to take arms for that side which is most offensive to us, and to give sickness, want, and contempt a bitter and nauseous taste, if it be in our power to give them a pleasant relish, and if, fortune simply providing the matter, ‘tis for us to give it the form.

The Essenians, of whom Pliny speaks, kept up their country for several ages without either nurse or baby-clouts, by the arrival of strangers who, following this pretty humour, came continually to them: a whole nation being resolute, rather to hazard a total extermination, than to engage themselves in female embraces, and rather to lose the succession of men, than to beget one.

The ambassadors of the king of Mexico, setting out to Fernando Cortez the power and greatness of their master, after having told him, that he had thirty vassals, of whom each was able to raise an hundred thousand fighting men, and that he kept his court in the fairest and best fortified city under the sun, added at last, that he was obliged yearly to offer to the gods fifty thousand men.

I never stick at giving or taking place out of rule, to avoid the trouble of such ceremony; and never any man had a mind to go before me, but I permitted him to do it.

As to our diverse usages of giving the lie, and the laws of honour in that case, and the alteration they have received, I defer saying what I know of them to another time, and shall learn, if I can, in the meanwhile, at what time the custom took beginning of so exactly weighing and measuring words, and of making our honour interested in them; for it is easy to judge that it was not anciently amongst the Romans and Greeks.

They who banish serious imaginations from their sports, do, says one, like him who dares not adore the statue of a saint, if not covered with a veil. We eat and drink, indeed, as beasts do; but these are not actions that obstruct the functions of the soul, in these we maintain our advantage over them; this other action subjects all other thought, and by its imperious authority makes an ass of all Plato’s divinity and philosophy; and yet there is no complaint of it.

Deliberation, even in things of lightest moment, is very troublesome to me; and I find my mind more put to it to undergo the various tumblings and tossings of doubt and consultation, than to set up its rest and to acquiesce in whatever shall happen after the die is thrown. Few passions break my sleep, but of deliberations, the least will do it. As in roads, I preferably avoid those that are sloping and slippery, and put myself into the beaten track how dirty or deep soever, where I can fall no lower, and there seek my safety: so I love misfortunes that are purely so, that do not torment and tease me with the uncertainty of their growing better; but that at the first push plunge me directly into the worst that can be expected

Is it to be imagined that an apoplexy will not stun Socrates as well as a porter? Some men have forgotten their own names by the violence of a disease; and a slight wound has turned the judgment of others topsy-turvy. Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man; and than that what is there more frail, more miserable, or more nothing? Wisdom does not force our natural dispositions,

Mundus domus est maxima rerum, Quam quinque altitonæ fragmine zonæ Cingunt, per quam limbus pictus bis sex signis Stellimicantibus, altus in obliquo æthere, lunæ Bigas acceptat.

To Monsieur DUPUY,--[This is probably the Claude Dupuy, born at Paris in 1545, and one of the fourteen judges sent into Guienne after the treaty of Fleix in 1580. It was perhaps under these circumstances that Montaigne addressed to him the present letter.]--the King’s Councillor in his Court and Parliament of Paris.

[“And so where they choose to carry [the arrows], the winds allow the wounds; the sword has strength of arm: and whatever nation of men there is, they wage war with swords.”--Lucan, viii. 384.]

They had, moreover, other devices which custom made them perfect in (which seem incredible to us who have not seen them), by which they supplied the effects of our powder and shot. They darted their spears with so great force, as ofttimes to transfix two targets and two armed men at once, and pin them together. Neither was the effect of their slings less certain of execution or of shorter carriage:

Proctagoras and Aristo gave no other essence to the justice of laws than the authority and opinion of the legislator; and that, these laid aside, the honest and the good lost their qualities, and remained empty names of indifferent things; Thrasymachus, in Plato, is of opinion that there is no other right but the convenience of the superior.

Man must be compelled and restrained within the bounds of this polity. Miserable creature! he is not in a condition really to step over the rail. He is fettered and circumscribed, he is subjected to the same necessity that the other creatures of his rank and order are, and of a very mean condition, without any prerogative of true and real pre-eminence. That which he attributes to himself, by vain fancy and opinion, has neither body nor taste.

“Scilicet grandes viridi cum luce smaragdi Auto includuntur, teriturque thalassina vestis Assidue, et Veneris sudorem exercita potat;”

And the execution is yet rendered more odious by the behaviour of Diomedon, who, being one of the condemned, and a man of most eminent virtue, political and military, after having heard the sentence, advancing to speak, no audience till then having been allowed, instead of laying before them his own cause, or the impiety of so cruel a sentence, only expressed a solicitude for his judges’ preservation, beseeching the gods to convert this sentence to their good, and praying that, for neglecting to fulfil the vows which he and his companions had made (with which he also acquainted them) in acknowledgment of so glorious a success, they might not draw down the indignation of the gods upon them; and so without more words went courageously to his death.

Is there more noise or confusion in the scolding of herring-wives than in the public disputes of men of this profession? I had rather my son should learn in a tap-house to speak, than in the schools to prate. Take a master of arts, and confer with him: why does he not make us sensible of this artificial excellence? and why does he not captivate women and ignoramuses, as we are, with admiration at the steadiness of his reasons and the beauty of his order?

“For if the mind be changed to that degree As of past things to lose all memory, So great a change as that, I must confess, Appears to me than death but little less.”

Sæpe duobus Regibus incessit magno discordia motu; Continuoque animos vulgi et trepidantia bello Gorda licet longé præsciscere.

[“And as fires applied in several parts to a dry wood and crackling shrubs of laurel, or as with impetuous fall from the steep mountains, foaming torrents pour down to the ocean, each clearing a destructive course.”--AEneid, xii. 521.]

Assuredly, it costs me more than half the pain I endure, to see you suffer; and reasonably so, because the evils which we ourselves feel we do not actually ourselves suffer, but it certain sentient faculties which God plants in us, that feel them: whereas what we feel on account of others, we feel by consequence of a certain reasoning process which goes on within our minds.

There are infinite examples of like popular resolutions which seem the more fierce and cruel in proportion as the effect is more universal, and yet are really less so than when singly executed; what arguments and persuasion cannot do with individual men, they can do with all, the ardour of society ravishing particular judgments.

Plato argues thus, that the faculty of prophesying is so far above us, that we must be out of ourselves when we meddle with it, and our prudence must either be obstructed by sleep or sickness, or lifted from her place by some celestial rapture.

And whoever will inquire into his own being and power, both within and without, without this divine privilege; whoever shall consider man impartially, and without flattery, will see in him no efficacy or faculty that relishes of any thing but death and earth. The more we give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater Christianity.

But do we not, moreover, every Good Friday, in various places, see great numbers of men and women beat and whip themselves till they lacerate and cut the flesh to the very bones? I have often seen it, and ‘tis without any enchantment; and it was said there were some amongst them (for they go disguised) who for money undertook by this means to save harmless the religion of others, by a contempt of pain, so much the greater, as the incentives of devotion are more effectual than those of avarice.

But supposing all this were not true, there is nevertheless a certain respect, a general duty of humanity, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees, and plants. We owe justice to men, and graciousness and benignity to other creatures that are capable of it; there is a certain commerce and mutual obligation betwixt them and us.

Posterity may credit me, if it chooses, when I swear upon my conscience, that I knew and saw him to be such as, all things considered, I could neither desire nor imagine a genius surpassing his.

At all events, the damage occasioned by my absence seems not to deserve, so long as I am able to support it, that I should waive the occasions of diverting myself by that troublesome assistance.