1569 he published his French version of the Natural Theology of Raymond Sebond; his Apology is only partly a defence of Sebond and sets sceptical limits to human reasoning about God, man and nature.

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‘Dr Screech’s principal achievement has been to render Montaigne into contemporary English without quaintness, but also without sacrifice of that flavour of the sixteenth century which is implicit in Montaigne’s thinking … We want the essence of the man in a form accessible to modern readers, and that is what the translator has so gracefully given us’

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He is one of a select band of authors: he leads us to feel that we know him – not partially, as an author, but fully, as an individual person. Only a residual respect for convention stopped him from portraying himself in his native simplicity, ‘whole, and wholly naked’. Thank goodness he did not worry over-much about taboos of language or of topic; as a result we know the form of his mind better than that of anybody who wrote before him. Montaigne himself judged that he and his book were ‘of one substance’ with each other. Within his covers we find not merely a wise book but a wise man.

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Montaigne was no don manqué, yet he changed the way we think about ourselves and about mankind. He achieved that revolution not by hectoring or by preaching, not by political manœuvring or by academic brilliance, but by writing about subjects which interested him, so letting us see the slant of his mind.

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He made excellent use of the rhetorical techniques favoured in his day in order to set forth his ideas clearly, persuasively and often humorously. He wrote with a simple directness which won him readers far beyond the formally educated few: he was read and admired by statesmen such as Henry of Navarre (the future Henri Quatre for whom Paris was well worth a Mass). One of his valets realized the cash value of his writings and stole the only copy of one of his chapters (it has never resurfaced). He was much admired by noblewomen too.

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Montaigne did not have a firm plan when he set about writing his Essays. His book and his aims changed and grew as he changed and grew in wisdom. That he was original and challenging is not, in retrospect, all that surprising.

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His father, possibly under the influence of the ideas of the Humanist theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam, arranged for Latin to be his native tongue. A special tutor was brought from Germany; his parents and the servants learned sufficient Latin to speak to him in nothing but that language. He lost his fluency in speaking Latin when his father, getting cold feet, sent him to board at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, but he never ceased to read it with ease and delight. Even his Greek philosophers he read (as Renaissance scholars often did) in Latin translation. Latin was the language of educated men, still the dominant language of school, university and learning generally. In addition to Latin, Montaigne also had to learn French: in his region the language was Gascon.

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it may come as a surprise that the whole undertaking of writing the Essays arose out of a crisis of melancholy. When his father died in June 1568 Montaigne, as his son and heir, resigned his legal office in the Parlement of Bordeaux and withdrew to his estates. His closest of friends, Etienne de la Boëtie, had died unexpectedly some four years earlier (August 1563), leaving a yearning gap in Montaigne’s life which nothing was ever completely to fill. They had spent very little time actually together, but they felt great joy in each other’s company and in their conversation; Montaigne was convinced that their friendship was of the rarest kind…

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His withdrawal to his estates was not, therefore, a hermit’s withdrawal into literal solitude; it was, however, a conscious rejection of negotium in favour of otium, of, that is, a busy preoccupation with affairs in favour of learned leisure. In this Montaigne was following the practice and counsel of many a sage in Classical and Christian antiquity. Both Seneca and Augustine of Hippo would have appreciated his aim. He covered his library with quotations from Greek and Latin…

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learned leisure was a great ideal, but, for Montaigne, it did not turn out well in practice. Instead of finding peace and mental repose he fell into chagrin (a melancholic depression). He experienced the kind of anguish which Milton describes in Il Penseroso and in his Ode to Melancholy. Where he had hoped that his mind would be content with a private, bookish idleness he found that it ‘bolted off like a runaway horse’, giving birth to ‘chimeras and fantastic monstrosities’.…

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Before that access of melancholy he had apparently intended to write short discourses on matters of war and high policy – matters which directly concerned him as a gentleman who fought in the civil wars. He stood both for the Old Religion and, where the French monarchy was concerned, for the legitimate succession to the throne (which, for him, was independent of the religion of the heir). The…

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In fact all the chapters of the first two Books are marked to some extent by that access of melancholy or by the remembrance of it. That is to be expected. Montaigne’s native complexion was a balanced mixture of humours, of the melancholy and the sanguine (II, 17). It was a good one to have: ever since the Problems of Aristotle (or Pseudo-Aristotle), that or a similar complexion was seen as the basis of all genius. But it was also a worrying one to have: the same Problems (30–1) also declared it to be potentially the sole basis of many distressing kinds of madness.

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One of the marked features of Montaigne’s writings as a younger man is a preoccupation with death – not with being dead but with the act of dying.

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The title Essays is one of striking modesty. It is nearer to ‘assay’ than to ‘essay’ as used today. The term was used of schoolboys’ ‘attempts’ or ‘exercises’; it was used when apprentices tried out their skills, well before producing their masterpiece; it was used when gold or silver was ‘assayed’ to find out its worth. What Montaigne was ‘assaying’ was both his ‘self’ and his opinions. He realized virtually from the outset that, since he was not a past master in any of the arts or sciences, he was not stating conclusions but exploring opinions – his opinions. Since he was writing philosophy, he could normally leave revelation aside and concentrate on whatever fell within the fields of human intellect and emotion.

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His apparent subjects did not really matter to him: he could write, he said, about a fly! Whatever the subject of a chapter, Montaigne was really ‘assaying’ himself. He was breaking one of Europe’s greatest taboos by writing thus about himself. (Nobody had ever done so before – not even Saint Augustine, whose Confessions are more a work of theology than of moral philosophy.) Montaigne was not at first fully conscious that he was doing so, but he was quickly aware of the strangeness of his enterprise: … unless I am saved by oddness and novelty … I shall never extricate myself from this daft undertaking … It was a melancholy humour (and therefore a humour most inimical to my natural complexion) brought on by the chagrin caused by the solitary retreat I plunged myself into a few years ago which first put into my mind this raving concern with writing.

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He found his enterprise to be ‘wild and monstrous’ or, on second thoughts, ‘wild and fantastically eccentric’. But he soon concluded that he was producing a self-portrait, analogous to the self-portraits which artists were increasingly painting in their studios. The portrait was, at first, mainly that of his forma mentis, the slant of his mind. (A sustained concern with his body came much later.) It portrays for us the way he thought and felt and, therefore, acted. There was at the outset little or no claim to reach unshakeable conclusions. But unlike the artist in his studio who catches in pencil or paint a fixed likeness of himself and of his character, Montaigne discovered that he could never pin down a stable ‘I’ which he could study: his ‘I’ as the writer was ever-changing; his ‘I’ as the subject was ever-changing too.

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Montaigne’s method of avoiding the perils of pure introspection was to turn his gaze outward on to events, people or books and then to bring the subjects back to himself to find what his opinions about them really were. He did this with increasing confidence once he found that men may differ in degree but not in kind.

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Montaigne, quite revolutionarily, started from the other end: he studied his own mind, his own form, and, since he, like anyone else, bore the whole form of the human condition, he applied his knowledge of himself to anyone he met in life, by report or in books. Recent changes in the way Aristotle was interpreted greatly helped him in his enterprise. Traditionally, strict Aristotelians allowed there to be nothing but absolute identity between all human forms. Individual differences arose not in the form but in the complex linking of soul (form) with its body (matter). Renaissance theologians (and many moral philosophers) insisted. on the contrary, that just as there are many shades of white which still nevertheless remain white, so there are many grades of human soul which still remain human souls. Some are greater or higher than others: some are baser and lower. All remain human. Montaigne accepts that view. So even a mediocre human soul and a splendid one remain, as it were, in touch with each other. Each can understand the other. Even a base soul can, in some circumstances, attain momentarily to the calm virtue which Socrates could sustain throughout his adult life.

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Montaigne came to believe that no man ever ceased to be Man – not even Socrates, not even Homer. Similarly, men were never so wicked or evil that other men ceased to have cousinage with them. He also came to be convinced that, since Man is body and soul, to portray only the soul is signally inadequate: human beings are ‘wondrously corporeal’ (III, 8). The soul can influence the body, but the body can also influence the soul! That is how it should be: the body has its rights, its joys, its pabulum and its duties; they may be less valid and less enduring than those of the soul but they have their place within the wise and moral life of Man. Only saints, under grace, may rightly neglect the body as their enraptured souls enjoy an ecstatic foretaste of future joy. The rest of us must keep our feet on the ground, teaching the body and soul to live wedded together in mutual harmony, until death them do part.

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He was deeply influenced by the Ancient Stoics. His own sceptical turn of mind was reinforced by his discovery of authentic Ancient scepticism in the works of Pyrrho. His taste for life was partly guided by the Epicureans. It is sometimes suggested that he was first a Stoic, then a Sceptic, then an Epicurean. In fact he held those and other philosophies in easy harmony. Ancient philosophers easily swayed him, but one did not replace another completely. Increasingly he came to appreciate, however, the humanity of Socrates, the calm judgement of Plutarch and, despite his verbosity and vanity, the wisdom of Cicero, who attached a real and solid importance to the body

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Greek.) The wider background to much of Montaigne’s moral thought is provided by Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics. For Montaigne – an outstanding pupil of the School of Athens – Aristotle and the Peripatetics were the Ancients who were most concerned with civility. Plato, though admired, sought to rise too high and was anyway outstripped by his master, Socrates, who was content to ‘re-form’ his soul and to remain a man. Yet no man, no author, not even the greatest, ever provides the last word on anything. Men are ‘vain authorities who can resolve nothing’

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Montaigne’s natural and acquired scepticism were both greatly increased by the vast new horizons of the Renaissance, which had opened up the riches of Ancient thought and more modern science, at the same time as the discovery of more and more new peoples and new lands put established ‘certainties’ to the test. Montaigne came to understand the ‘barbarity’ of the Incas: he found it preferable to the cruelty and compromises of the Europe of his own times.

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The year that Montaigne began to write, 1572, is that of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day and of the beginning of the Fourth Civil War in France. 1580, the year of the original edition of the Essays, is the year of the Seventh Civil War, in southern France. 1588, the year of what seemed at first to be the definitive edition of the Essays, saw the Guises entering Paris; King Henry III fleeing; the invincible Armada blown to perdition by what Protestant Europe saw as the breath of God; and the murder of Henri de Guise and of his brother the Cardinal at the instigation of their King. When Montaigne died in 1592 civil war was still raging, with peasants having recently revolted in Brittany while the English supported Henri Quatre in Normandy. Those events eroded not only political and ecclesiastical systems; they eroded the very basis of law and morality. But ‘suffering is good for poets’, and momentous events form a rich backcloth for a man like Montaigne, who can be seen not merely talking as a philosopher but acting as one. He is sometimes presented as a bookworm: in fact he was anything but that. He tells us that he rarely spent more than an hour at a time with a book; but there are many hours in a lifetime and many an hour for reflections upon one hour’s reading.

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When he was in Rome a friendly and powerful cleric, the Maestro di Palazzo of the Vatican, read the Essays and suggested changes, leaving Montaigne to do what he thought right. Some changes Montaigne made; in other cases he strengthened his argument, or made his position clearer. But when ‘the magistrate’ overstepped the mark, rebuking him for having judged that Beza (the successor to Calvin) was an excellent Latin poet, Montaigne stood his ground. He opposed the New Religion, just as he opposed innovation within the State, but he did so without hatred and anger:

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But he won even greater respect for the guidance which he gave to men and women in search of a sound, wise and moral way to live. As Marc Fumaroli of the Collège de France has so cogently argued, there was a widespread desire in Roman Catholic circles in France – and, one could add, in Anglican circles in England – for a liberal spirituality, free from the constraints of the traditional clerical models and adapted to the circumstances of the independent lives of the laity. Montaigne began with his own self during a period of personal strain and peril: he ended up confidently seeking how men should (by the canons of natural reason and natural wisdom) live well and die well. His Essays show us not only what he thought but how he reached his poise and contentment, despite the plague, despite the suicidal pains of the stone, despite the collapse of the State and despite the din of conflicting opinions and the marauding bands around him.

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In 1588 he republished his first two Books, making numerous modifications, and added a third one. But he was never satisfied: his Essays are not a static work but a process. No sooner had he published those three Books than he set about changing a little and adding much. Death overtook him before he could send his final text to the printer, but it was virtually ready for publication.

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The last pages of the last chapter, On Experience, represent the sum of his wisdom and the end of his long quest. Those last pages were intended to be read last: they correct, resume, modify or emphasize such glimpses of wisdom as Montaigne had discovered. They tell us how he – and we – can enjoy living richly as human beings into a serene and grateful old age.

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The first sentence of that final chapter echoes the first sentence of one of the most famous of all books. (That sentence was known by heart by schoolboys, let alone by dons and dominies; it comes from Aristotle’s Metaphysics.) [B] No desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge. For Aristotle that truth pointed the way to the mastering of all those arts which are based not on high reason but on lowly experience. Experience (which included experimentation) underlies medicine and common law, which are the ‘arts’ par excellence. Montaigne however is not convinced that experience, without sound judgement, is any better than wayward reason: [B] Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to resort to: experience has no fewer. The opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics had long been used to prove the existence of an afterlife. Mankind has been given by Nature a desire to know. In this life that desire is never satisfied. Since Nature does nothing without a cause, there must be a life after this one in which that desire can indeed be satisfied. By implication Montaigne accepts that argument: he soon reaches the conclusion that ‘there is no end to our inquiries: our end is in the next world’.

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From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure from an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.

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Within that general rule Montaigne found that each person was wise to live, as far as proper and as far as possible, secundum se (in accordance with his own inborn characteristics). He might, if he follows Socrates, strive to re-form his soul: what he will not do is to strive, unaided, to live like an angel. If he does, he will sink to the level of the beast.

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Montaigne set out to discover himself. He did more than that: he discovered what makes the human race fully human.

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I have tried to convey Montaigne’s sense and something of his style, without archaisms but without forcing him into an unsuitable, demotic English. I have not found that his meaning is more loyally conveyed by clinging in English to the grammar and constructions of his French: French and English achieve their literary effect by different means. On the other hand I have tried to translate his puns: they clearly mattered to him, and it was fun doing so. Montaigne’s sentences are often very long; where the sense does not suffer I have left many of them as they are. It helps to retain something of his savour.

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translation.’ In Montaigne’s French this difficulty is even greater since his sense of gender enables him to flit in and out of various degrees of personification in ways not open to writers of English. Where the personification is certain or a vital though implied element of the meaning I have sometimes used a capital letter and personal pronouns, etc., to produce a similar effect.

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1568 Death of Montaigne’s father, Pierre. Montaigne becomes Seigneur de Montaigne and inherits the domain. (Difficulties with his mother over the inheritance.) 1569 Montaigne publishes his French translation of the Theologia Naturalis of Raymond Sebond (Raymundus de Sabunde), with the printer G. Chaudière of Paris. 1570 Montaigne sells his counsellorship of the Parlement de Bordeaux. Goes to Paris to publish works left by Etienne de la Boëtie (Latin, then French). Birth of his first daughter, Toinette, who dies three months later. 1571 Montaigne returns to his estates, to consecrate his life to the Muses: to scholarship, philosophy and reflection. He receives the Ordre de Saint-Michel and is named Gentleman of the Chamber by Charles IX. Birth of Léonor (the only one of his six daughters to live). 1572 24 August: massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day. Uprisings at La Rochelle (a stronghold of the Reformed Church). Publication of the French translation of the Moral Works of Plutarch by Bishop Amyot. It joins other authors studied by Montaigne in the tower of his château.

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[A] You have here, Reader, a book whose faith can be trusted, a book which warns you from the start that I have set myself no other end but a private family one. I have not been concerned to serve you nor my reputation: my powers are inadequate for such a design. I have dedicated this book to the private benefit of my friends and kinsmen so that, having lost me (as they must do soon) they can find here again some traits of my character and of my humours. They will thus keep their knowledge of me more full, more alive. If my design had been to seek the favour of the world I would have decked myself out [C] better and presented myself in a studied gait.fn1 [A] Here I want to be seen in my simple, natural, everyday fashion, without [C] strivingfn2 [A] or artifice: for it is my own self that I am painting. Here, drawn from life, you will read of my defects and my native form so far as respect for social convention allows: for had I found myself among those peoples who are said still to live under the sweet liberty of Nature’s primal laws, I can assure you that I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole, and wholly naked. And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.

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The Emperor Conrad III had besieged Guelph, Duke of Bavaria; no matter how base and cowardly were the satisfactions offered him, the most generous condition he would vouchsafe was to allow the noblewomen who had been besieged with the Duke to come out honourably on foot, together with whatever they could carry on their persons. They, with greatness of heart, decided to carry out on their shoulders their husbands, their children and the Duke himself. The Emperor took such great pleasure at seeing the nobility of their minds that he wept for joy and quenched all the bitterness of that mortal deadly hatred he had harboured against the Duke; from then on he treated him and his family kindly.

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respect. Yet for the Stoics pity is a vicious emotion: they want us to succour the afflicted but not to give way and commiserate with them.

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And, directly against my first examples, Alexander, the staunchest of men and the most generous towards the vanquished, stormed, after great hardship, the town of Gaza and came across Betis who commanded it; of his valour during the siege he had witnessed staggering proofs; now Betis was alone, deserted by his own men, his weapons shattered; all covered with blood and wounds, he was still fighting in the midst of several Macedonians who were slashing at him on every side. Alexander was irritated by so dearly won a victory (among other losses he had received two fresh wounds in his own body); he said to him: ‘You shall not die as you want to, Betis! Take note that you will have to suffer every kind of torture which can be thought up against a prisoner!’ To these menaces Betis (not only looking assured but contemptuous and proud) replied not a word. Then Alexander, seeing his haughty and stubborn silence, said: ‘Has he bent his knee? Has he let a word of entreaty slip out? Truly I will overcome that refusal of yours to utter a sound: if I cannot wrench a word from you I will at least wrench a groan.’ And as his anger turned to fury he ordered his heels to be piercedfn5 and, dragging him alive behind a cart, had him lacerated and dismembered. Was it because [C] bravery was so usual for himfn6 that [B] he was never struck with wonder by it and therefore respected it less? [C] Or was it because he thought bravery to be so properly his own that he could not bear to see it at such a height in anyone else without anger arising from an emotion of envy; or did the natural violence of his anger allow of no opposition?

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Just as fallow lands, when rich and fertile, are seen to abound in hundreds and thousands of different kinds of useless weeds so that, if we would make them do their duty, we must subdue them and keep them busy with seeds specifically sown for our service; and just as women left alone may sometimes be seen to produce shapeless lumps of flesh but need to be kept busy by a semen other than her own in order to produce good natural offspring: so too with our minds.fn1 If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject which can serve as a bridle to reign them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts:

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When the soul is without a definite aim she gets lost; for, as they say, if you are everywhere you are nowhere. [B] Quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat. [Whoever dwells everywhere, Maximus, dwells nowhere at all.]fn4

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[Idleness always produces fickle changes of mind]

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it bolted off like a runaway horse, taking far more trouble over itself than it ever did over anyone else; it gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities, one after another, without order or fitness, that, so as to contemplate at my ease their oddness and their strangeness, I began to keep a record of them, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.fn6

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I once heard a prince, a very great general, maintain that a soldier should not be condemned to death for cowardice: he was at table, being told about the trial of the Seigneur de Vervins who was sentenced to death for surrendering Boulogne.

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Where cowardice is concerned the usual way is, certainly, to punish it by disgrace and ignominy. It is said that this rule was first introduced by Charondas the lawgiver, and that before his time the laws of Greece condemned to death those who had fled from battle, whereas he ordered that they be made merely to sit for three days in the market-place dressed as women:fn2 he hoped he could still make use of them once he had restored their courage by this disgrace – [C] ‘Suffundere malis hominis sanguinem quam effundere.’ [Make the blood of a bad man blush not gush.]fn3

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I am not much of a ‘natural philosopher’ – that is the term they use; I have hardly any idea of the mechanisms by which fear operates in us; but it is a very odd emotion all the same; doctors say that there is no emotion which more readily ravishes our judgement from its proper seat. I myself have seen many men truly driven out of their minds by fear, and it is certain that, while the fit lasts, fear engenders even in the most staid of men a terrifying confusion.

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leave aside simple folk, for whom fear sometimes conjures up visions of their great-grandsires rising out of their graves still wrapped in their shrouds, or else of chimeras, werewolves or goblins; but even among [C] soldiers,fn2 [A] where fear ought to be able to find very little room, how many times have I seen it change a flock of sheep into a squadron of knights in armour; reeds or bulrushes into men-at-arms and lancers; our friends, into enemies; a white cross into a red one.

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Sometimes fear as in the first two examples puts wings on our heels; at others it hobbles us and nails our feet to the ground, as happened to the Emperor Theophilus in the battle which he lost against the Agarenes; we read that he was so enraptured and so beside himself with fear, that he could not even make up his mind to run away: [B] ‘adeo pavor etiam auxilia formidat’ [so much does fear dread even help].fn6 [A] Eventually Manuel, one of the foremost commanders of his army, shook him and pulled him roughly about as though rousing him from a profound sleep, saying, ‘If you will not follow me I will kill you; the loss of your life matters less than the loss of the Empire if you are taken prisoner.’

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It is fear that I am most afraid of. In harshness it surpasses all other mischances.

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[Then fear banishes all wisdom from my heart.]

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People with a pressing fear of losing their property or of being driven into exile or enslaved also lose all desire to eat, drink or sleep, whereas those who are actually impoverished, banished or enslaved often enjoy life as much as anyone else. And many people, unable to withstand the stabbing pains of fear, have hanged themselves, drowned themselves or jumped to their deaths, showing us that fear is even more importunate and unbearable than death.

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Cicero says that philosophizing is nothing other than getting ready to die.fn1 That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps it is because all the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion; which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying.

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all the labour of reason must be to make us live well, and at our ease, as Holy [C] Scripture [A] says.fn2 All the opinions in the world reach the same point, [C] that pleasure is our target [A] even though they may get there by different means; otherwise we would throw them out immediately, for who would listen to anyone whose goal was to achieve for us [C] pain and suffering?

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Even in virtue our ultimate aim – no matter what they say – is pleasure. I enjoy bashing people’s ears with that word which runs so strongly counter to their minds. When pleasure is taken to mean the most profound delight and an exceeding happiness it is a better companion to virtue than anything else; and rightly so. Such pleasure is no less seriously pleasurable for being more lively, taut, robust and virile. We ought to have given virtue the more favourable, noble and natural name of pleasure not (as we have done) a name derived from vis (vigour).

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There is that lower voluptuous pleasure which can only be said to have a disputed claim to the name not a privileged right to it. I find it less pure of lets and hindrances than virtue. Apart from having a savour which is fleeting, fluid and perishable, it has its vigils, fasts and travails, its blood and its sweat; it also has its own peculiar sufferings, which are sharp in so many different ways and accompanied by a satiety of such weight that it amounts to repentance.fn6

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A man is quite unworthy of an acquaintance with virtue who weighs her fruit against the price she exacts; he knows neither her graces nor her ways. Those who proceed to teach us that the questing after virtue is rugged and wearisome whereas it is delightful to possess her can only mean that she always lacks delight.fn7 (For what human means have ever brought anyone to the joy of possessing her?) Even the most perfect of men have been satisfied with aspiring to her – not possessing her but drawing near to her. The contention is wrong, seeing that in every pleasure known to Man the very pursuit of it is…

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Now one of virtue’s main gifts is a contempt for death, which is the means of furnishing our life with easy tranquillity, of giving us a pure and friendly taste for it; without it every other pleasure is snuffed out. [A] That is why all rules meet and concur in this one clause.fn8 [C] It is true that they all lead us by common accord to despise pain, poverty and the other misfortunes to which human lives are subject, but they do not do so with the same care. That is partly because such misfortunes are not inevitable. (Most of Mankind spend their lives without tasting poverty; some without even experiencing pain or sickness, like Xenophilus the musician, who lived in good health to a hundred and six.) It is also because, if the worse comes to worse, we can sheer off the bung of our misfortunes whenever we like: death can end them.fn9 But, as for death itself, that is inevitable. [B] Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium Versatur urna, serius ocius Sors excitura et nos in æter- Num exitium impositura cymbæ. [All of our lots are shaken about in the Urn, destined sooner or later to be cast forth, placing us in Charon’s skiff for everlasting exile.]fn10 [A] And so if death makes us afraid, that is…

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The end of our course is death.fn13 It is the objective necessarily within our sights. If death frightens us how can we go one step forward without anguish? For ordinary people the remedy is not to think about it; but what brutish insensitivity can produce so gross a blindness? They lead the donkey by the tail: Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro. [They walk forward with their heads turned backwards.]fn14 No wonder that they often get caught in a trap. You can frighten such people simply by mentioning death (most of them cross themselves as when the Devil is named); and since it is mentioned in wills, never expect them to draw one up before the doctor has pronounced the death-sentence. And then, in the midst of pain and terror, God only knows what shape their good judgement kneads it into!

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(That syllable ‘death’ struck Roman ears too roughly; the very word was thought to bring ill-luck, so they learned to soften and dilute it with periphrases. Instead of saying He is dead they said He has ceased to live or He has lived. They [C] found consolation in [B] living, even in a past tense!

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it is exactly a fortnight since I became thirty-nine: ‘I ought to live at least as long again; meanwhile it would be mad to think of something so far off.’ – Yes, but all leave life in the same circumstances, young and old alike. [C] Everybody goes out as though he had just come in. [A] Moreover, however decrepit a man may be, he thinks he still has another [C] twenty years [A] to gofn17 in the body, so long as…

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As things usually go, you have been living for some time now by favour extraordinary. You have already exceeded the usual term of life; to prove it, just count how many more of your acquaintances have died younger than you are compared with those who have reached your age. Just make a list of people who have ennobled their lives by fame: I wager that we shall find more who died before thirty-five than after. It is full of reason and piety to take as our example the manhood of…

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Leaving aside fevers and pleurisies, who would ever have thought that a Duke of Brittany was to be crushed to death in a crowd, as one was during the state entry into Lyons of Pope Clement, who came from my part of the world! Have you not seen one of our kings killed at sport? And was not one of his ancestors killed by a bump from a pig? Aeschylus was warned against a falling house; he was always on the alert, but in vain: he was killed by the shell of a tortoise which slipped from the talons of an eagle in flight. Another choked to death on a pip from a grape; an Emperor died from a scratch when combing his hair; Aemilius Lepidus, from knocking his foot on his own doorstep; Aufidius from bumping into a door of his Council chamber. Those who died between a woman’s thighs include Cornelius Gallus, a…

Location 1074

And if I may include a personal example, Captain Saint-Martin, my brother, died at the age of twenty-three while playing tennis; he was felled by a blow from a tennis-ball just above the right ear. There was no sign of bruising or of a wound. He did not even sit down or take a rest; yet…

Location 1084

Yet when death does come – to them, their wives, their children, their friends – catching them unawares and unprepared, then what storms of passion overwhelm them, what cries, what fury, what despair! Have you ever seen anything brought so low, anything so changed, so confused? We must start providing for it earlier. Even if such brutish indifference could find lodgings in the head of an intelligent man (which seems quite impossible to me) it sells its wares too dearly.

Location 1097

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death. At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects. Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls or a pin pricks however slightly, let us at once chew over this thought: ‘Supposing that was death itself?’ With that, let us brace ourselves and make an effort. In the midst of joy and feasting let our refrain be one which recalls our human condition. Let us never be carried away by pleasure so strongly that we fail to recall occasionally how many are the ways in which that joy of ours is subject to death or how many are the fashions in which death threatens to snatch it away. That is what the Egyptians did: in the midst of all their banquets and good cheer they would bring in a mummified corpse to serve as a warning to the guests:fn24 Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum. Grata superveniet, quæ non sperabitur hora. [Believe that each day is the last to shine on you. If it comes, time not hoped for will be welcome indeed.]fn25 We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint. [C] Life has no evil for him who has thoroughly understood that loss of life is not an evil. [A] Paulus Aemilius was sent a messenger by that wretched King of Macedonia who was his prisoner, begging not to be led in his triumphant procession. He replied: ‘Let him beg that favour from himself.’ It is true that, in all things, if Nature does not lend a hand art and industry do not progress very far. I myself am not so much melancholic as an idle dreamer: from the outset there was no topic I ever concerned myself with more than with thoughts about death – even in the most licentious period of my life.

Location 1110

[B] Jam fuerit, nec post unquam revocare licebit. [The present will soon be the past, never to be recalled.]

Location 1134

Thoughts such as these did not furrow my brow any more than others did. At first it does seem impossible not to feel the sting of such ideas, but if you keep handling them and running through them you eventually tame them. No doubt about that. Otherwise I would, for my part, be in continual terror and frenzy: for no man ever had less confidence than I did that he would go on living; and no man ever counted less on his life proving long. Up till now I have enjoyed robust good health almost uninterruptedly: yet that never extends my hopes for life any more than sickness shortens them. Every moment it seems to me that I am running away from myself. [C] And I ceaselessly chant the refrain, ‘Anything you can do another day can be done now.’

Location 1136

truth risks and dangers do little or nothing to bring us nearer to death. If we think of all the millions of threats which remain hanging over us, apart from the one which happens to appear most menacing just now, we shall realize that death is equally near when we are vigorous or feverish, at sea or at home, in battle or in repose. [C] ‘Nemo altero fragilior est: nemo in crastinam sui certior.’ [No man is frailer than another: no man more certain of the morrow.]

Location 1142

If I have only one hour’s work to do before I die, I am never sure I have time enough to finish it. The other day someone was going through my notebooks and found a declaration about something I wanted done after my death. I told him straight that, though I was hale and healthy and but a league away from my house, I had hastened to jot it down because I had not been absolutely certain of getting back home. [C] Being a man who broods over his thoughts and stores them up inside him, I am always just about as ready as I can be: when death does suddenly appear, it will bear no new warning for me. [A] As far as we possibly can we must always have our boots on, ready to go; above all we should take care to have no outstanding business with anyone else.

Location 1146

One man complains less of death itself than of its cutting short the course of a fine victory; another, that he has to depart before marrying off his daughter or arranging the education of his children; one laments the company of his wife; another, of his son; as though they were the principal attributes of his being. [C] I am now ready to leave, thank God, whenever He pleases, regretting nothing except life itself – if its loss should happen to weigh heavy on me. I am untying all the knots. I have already half-said my adieus to everyone but myself. No man has ever prepared to leave the world more simply nor more fully than I have. No one has more completely let go of everything than I try to do.

Location 1154

We ought not to plan anything on so large a scale – at least, not if we are to get all worked up if we cannot see it through to the end. We are born for action:fn32 Cum moriar, medium solvare inter opus. [When I die, may I be in the midst of my work.] I want us to be doing things, [C] prolonging life’s duties as much as we can; [A] I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.

Location 1166

Our graveyards have been planted next to churches, says Lycurgus, so that women, children and lesser folk should grow accustomed to seeing a dead man without feeling terror, and so that this continual spectacle of bones, tombs and funerals should remind us of our human condition:fn34

Location 1176

I have adopted the practice of always having death not only in my mind but on my lips. There is nothing I inquire about more readily than how men have died: what did they say? How did they look? What expression did they have? There are no passages in the history books which I note more attentively. [C] That I have a particular liking for such matters is shown by the examples with which I stuff my book. If I were a scribbler I would produce a compendium with commentaries of the various ways men have died. (Anyone who taught men how to die would teach them how to live.)

Location 1186

I have noticed that as an illness gets more and more hold on me I naturally slip into a kind of contempt for life. I find that a determination to die is harder to digest when I am in good health than when I am feverish, especially since I no longer hold so firmly to the pleasures of life once I begin to lose the use and enjoyment of them, and can look on death with a far less terrified gaze. That leads me to hope that the further I get from good health and the nearer I approach to death the more easily I will come to terms with exchanging one for the other. Just as I have in several other matters assayed the truth of Caesar’s assertion that things often look bigger from afar than close to,fn38 I have also found that I was much more terrified of illness when I was well than when I felt ill.

Location 1195

If any of us were to be plunged into old age all of a sudden I do not think that the change would be bearable. But, almost imperceptibly, Nature leads us by the hand down a gentle slope; little by little, step by step, she engulfs us in that pitiful state and breaks us in, so that we feel no jolt when youth dies in us, although in essence and in truth that is a harsher death than the total extinction of a languishing life as old age dies. For it is not so grievous a leap from a wretched existence to nonexistence as it is from a sweet existence in full bloom to one full of travail and pain.

Location 1210

When our bodies are bent and stooping low they have less strength for supporting burdens. So too for our souls: we must therefore educate and train them for their encounter with that adversary, death; for the soul can find no rest while she remains afraid of him. But once she does find assurance she can boast that it is impossible for anxiety, anguish, fear or even the slightest dissatisfaction to dwell within her. And that almost surpasses our human condition.

Location 1214

Our religion has never had a surer human foundation than contempt for life; rational argument (though not it alone) summons us to such contempt: for why should we fear to lose something which, once lost, cannot be regretted? And since we are threatened by so many kinds of death is it not worse to fear them all than to bear one?fn43 [C] Death is inevitable: does it matter when it comes? When Socrates was told that the Thirty Tyrants had condemned him to death, he retorted, ‘And nature, them!’fn44 How absurd to anguish over our passing into freedom from all anguish. Just as our birth was the birth of all things for us, so our death will be the death of them all. That is why it is equally mad to weep because we shall not be alive a hundred years from now and to weep because we were not alive a hundred years ago. Death is the origin of another life. We wept like this and it cost us just as dear when we entered into this life, similarly stripping off our former veil as we did so. Nothing can be grievous which occurs but once; is it reasonable to fear for so long a time something which lasts so short a time?

Location 1230

Hypanis whose life lasts one single day: those which die at eight in the morning die in youth; those which die at five in the evening die of senility.fn45 Which of us would not laugh if so momentary a span counted as happiness or unhappiness? Yet if we compare our own span against eternity or even against the span of mountains, rivers, stars, trees or, indeed, of some animals, then saying shorter or longer becomes equally ridiculous.

Location 1241

Nature drives us that way, too:fn46 ‘Leave this world,’ she says, ‘just as you entered it. That same journey from death to life, which you once made without suffering or fear, make it again from life to death. Your death is a part of the order of the universe; it is a part of the life of the world: [B] inter se mortales mutua vivunt … Et quasi cursores vitaï lampada tradunt. [Mortal…

Location 1245

Shall I change, just for you, this beautiful interwoven structure! Death is one of the attributes you were created with; death is a part of you; you are running away from yourself; this being which you enjoy is equally divided between death and life. From the day you were born your path leads to death as well as life: Prima, quae vitam dedit, hora, carpsit. [Our first hour gave us life and began to devour it.] Nascentes…

Location 1251

All that you live, you have stolen from life; you live at her expense. Your life’s continual task is to build your death. You are in death while you are in life: when you are no more in life you are after death. Or if you prefer it thus: after life you are dead, but during life you are dying: and death touches the…

Location 1258

Make way for others as others did for you. [C] The first part of equity is equality. Who can complain of being included when all are included?fn54

Location 1284

‘It is no good going on living: it will in no wise shorten the time you will stay dead. It is all for nothing: you will be just as long in that state which you fear as though you had died at the breast; licet, quod vis, vivendo vincere secla, Mors æterna tamen nihilominus illa manebit. [Triumph over time and live as long as you please: death eternal will still be waiting for you.]

Location 1286

[Do you not know that in real death there will be no second You, living to lament your death and standing by your corpse.]

Location 1293

behind you is no more yours than the time which passed before you were born;fn56 [B] and does not concern you either: Respice enim quam nil ad nos ante acta vetustas Temporis æterni fuerit. [Look back and see that the aeons of eternity before we were born have been nothing to us.]

Location 1303

The usefulness of living lies not in duration but in what you make of it. Some have lived long and lived little. See to it while you are still here. Whether you have lived enough depends not on a count of years but on your will.

Location 1308

Does not everything move with the same motion as you do? Is there anything which is not growing old with you? At this same [C] instant [A] that you diefn58 hundreds of men, of beasts and of other creatures are dying too.

Location 1314

‘Why do you pull back when retreat is impossible? You have seen cases enough where men were lucky to die, avoiding great misfortunes by doing so: but have you ever seen anyone for whom death turned out badly? And it is very simple-minded of you to condemn something which you have never experienced either yourself or through another. Why do you complain of mefn60 or of Destiny? Do we do you wrong? Should you govern us or should we govern you? You may not have finished your stint but you have finished your life. A small man is no less whole than a tall one. Neither men nor their lives are measured by the yard. Chiron refused immortality when he was told of its characteristics by his father Saturn, the god of time and of duration.fn61

Location 1321

‘Truly imagine how much less bearable for Man, and how much more painful, would be a life which lasted for ever rather than the life which I have given you. If you did not have death you would curse me, for ever, for depriving you of it. ‘Seeing what advantages death holds I have deliberately mixed a little anguish into it to stop you from embracing it too avidly or too injudiciously. To lodge you in that moderation which I require of you, neither fleeing from life nor yet fleeing from death, I have tempered them both between the bitter and the sweet.

Location 1328

I truly believe that what frightens us more than death itself are those terrifying grimaces and preparations with which we surround it – a brand new way of life: mothers, wives and children weeping; visits from people stunned and beside themselves with grief; the presence of a crowd of servants, pale and tear-stained; a bedchamber without daylight; candles lighted; our bedside besieged by doctors and preachers; in short, all about us is horror and terror. We are under the ground, buried in our graves already! Children are frightened of their very friends when they see them masked. So are we. We must rip the masks off things as well as off people. Once we have done that we shall find underneath only that same death which a valet and a chambermaid got through recently, without being afraid.fn64 Blessed fn65 the death which leaves no time for preparing such gatherings of mourners.

Location 1340

these writings of mine are no more than the ravings of a man who has never done more than taste the outer crust of knowledge

Location 1362

jurisprudence;

Location 1365

But what I have definitely not done is to delve deeply into them, biting my nails over the study of Aristotle,fn2 [C] that monarch of the doctrine of the Modernists,fn3 [A] or stubbornly persevering in any fieldfn4 of learning. [C] I could not sketch even the mere outlines of any art whatsoever; there is no boy even in the junior forms who cannot say he is more learned than I am: I could not even test him on his first lesson, at least not in detail. When forced to do so, I am constrained to extract (rather ineptly) something concerning universals,

Location 1366

I have fashioned no sustained intercourse with any solid book except Plutarch and Seneca; like the Danaïdes I am constantly dipping into them and then pouring out: I spill some of it on to this paper but next to nothing on to me.fn6

Location 1373

just as the voice of the trumpet rings out clearer and stronger for being forced through a narrow tube so too a saying leaps forth much more vigorously when compressed into the rhythms of poetry, striking me then with a livelier shock.

Location 1377

My concepts and judgement can only fumble their way forward, swaying, stumbling, tripping over; even when I have advanced as far as I can, I never feel satisfied, for I have a troubled cloudy vision of lands beyond, which I cannot make out. I undertake to write without preconceptions on any subject which comes to mind, employing nothing but my own natural resources: then if (as happens often) I chance to come across in excellent authors the very same topics I have undertaken to treat (as I have just done recently in Plutarch about the power of the imagination) I acknowledge myself to be so weak, so paltry, so lumbering and so dull compared with such men, that I feel scorn and pity for myself. I do congratulate myself, however, that my opinions frequently coincide with theirs [C] and on the fact that I do at least trail far behind them murmuring ‘Hear, hear’. [A] And again, I do know (what many do not) the vast difference there is between them and me. What I myself have thought up and produced is poor feeble stuff, but I let it go on, without plastering over the cracks or stitching up the rents which have been revealed by such comparisons.fn8 [C] You need a strong backbone if you undertake to march shoulder to shoulder with fellows like that.

Location 1379

Those rash authors of our own century who scatter whole passages from ancient writers throughout their own worthless works, seeking to acquire credit [C] thereby,fn9 [A] achieve the reverse; between them and the Ancients there is an infinite difference of lustre, which gives such a pale sallow ugly face to their own contributions that they lose far more than they gain.

Location 1389

The other day I chanced upon such a borrowing. I had languished along behind some French words, words so bloodless, so fleshless and so empty of matter that indeed they were nothing but French and nothing but words. At the end of a long and boring road I came upon a paragraph which was high, rich, soaring to the clouds. If I had found a long gentle slope leading up to it, that would have been pardonable: what I came across was a cliff surging up so straight and so steep that I knew I was winging my way to another world after the first half-a-dozen words. That was how I realized what a slough I had been floundering through beforehand, so base and so deep that I did not have the heart to sink back into it.

Location 1396

We must condemn faults anywhere and everywhere, allowing them no sanctuary whatsoever. Yet I myself know how valiantly I strive to measure up to my stolen wares and to match myself to them equal to equal, not without some rash hope of throwing dust in the eyes of critics who would pick them out (though more thanks to the skill with which I apply them than to my skill in discovering them or to any strengths of my own). Moreover I do not take on those old champions all at once, wrestling with them body to body: it is a matter of slight, repeated, tiny encounters. I do not cling on: I merely try them out, going less far than I intended…

Location 1404

what about the things I have caught others doing? They bedeck themselves in other men’s armour, with not…

Location 1409

In the case of those who wish to hide their borrowings and pass them off as their own, their action is, first and foremost, unjust and mean: they have nothing worthwhile of their own to show off so they try to recommend themselves with someone else’s goods; secondly it is stupid to be satisfied with winning, by cheating, the ignorant approbation of the crowd while losing all credit among men of understanding: their praise alone has any weight, but they look down their noses at our…

Location 1411

whatever these futilities of mine may be, I have no intention of hiding them, any more than I would a bald and grizzled portrait of myself just because the artist had painted not a perfect face but my own. Anyway these are my humours, my opinions: I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which…

Location 1419

I know nothing about education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.

Location 1428

When they are young they give such slight and obscure signs of their inclinations, while their promises are so false and unreliable, that it is hard to base any solid judgement upon them. [B] Look at Cimon, Themistocles and hundreds of others; think how unlike themselves they used to be! Bear-cubs and puppies manifest their natural inclinations but humans immediately acquire habits, laws and opinions; they easily change or adopt disguises.fn13

Location 1433

it is so hard to force a child’s natural bent. That explains why, having chosen the wrong route, we toil to no avail and often waste years training children for occupations in which they never achieve anything. All the same my opinion is that, faced by this difficulty, we should always guide them towards the best and most rewarding goals, and that we should attach little importance to those trivial prognostications and foretellings we base on their childish actions.

Location 1437

Learning, My Lady, is a great ornament and a useful instrument of wondrous service, especially in those who are fortunate to live in so high an estate as yours.

Location 1441

The son of the house is seeking book-learningfn15 not to make money (for so abject an end is unworthy of the grace and favour of the Muses and anyway has other aims and depends on others) nor for external advantages, but rather for those which are truly his own, those which inwardly enrich and adorn him. Since I would prefer that he turned out to be an able man not an erudite one, I would wish you to be careful to select as guide for him a tutor with a well-formed rather than a well-filled brain. Let both be looked for, but place character and intelligence before knowledge; and let him carry out his responsibilities in a new way.

Location 1452

Teachers are for ever bawling into our ears as though pouring knowledge down through a funnel: our task is merely to repeat what we have been told. I would want our tutor to put that right: as soon as the mind in his charge allows it, he should make it show its fettle by appreciating and selecting things – and by distinguishing between them; the tutor should sometimes prepare the way for the boy, sometimes let him do it all on his own. I do not want the tutor to be the only one to choose topics or to do all the talking: when the boy’s turn comes let the tutor listen to his pupil talking. [C] Socrates and then Arcesilaus used to make their pupils speak first; they spoke afterwards. ‘Obest plerumque iis qui discere volunt authoritas eorum qui docent.’ [For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be the authority of those who teach.]

Location 1457

It is good to make him trot in front of his tutor in order to judge his paces and to judge how far down the tutor needs to go to adapt himself to his ability. If we get that proportion wrong we spoil everything; knowing how to find it and to remain well-balanced within it is one of the most arduous tasks there is. It is the action of a powerful elevated mind to know how to come down to the…

Location 1464

Those who follow our French practice and undertake to act as schoolmaster for several minds diverse in kind and capacity, using the same teaching and the same degree of guidance for them all, not surprisingly can scarcely find in a whole tribe of children more than one or two who bear fruit from their education. [A] Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and made it part of himself, [C] judging the boy’s progress by what Plato taught about education. [A] Spewing up…

Location 1467

souls are moved only at second-hand, being shackled and constrained to what is desired by someone else’s ideas; they are captives, enslaved to the authority of what they have been taught. We have been so subjected to leading-reins that we take no free steps on our own. Our drive to be free has been quenched. [C] ‘Nunquam tutelae suae fiunt.’ [They are never free from tutelage.]fn18 [B] In Pisa I met, in private, a decent man who is such an Aristotelian that the most basic of his doctrines is that the touchstone and the measuring-scale of all sound ideas and of each and every truth lie in their conformity with the teachings of Aristotle, outside of which all is inane and chimerical: Aristotle has…

Location 1476

Let the principles of Aristotle not be principles for him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicureans. Let this diversity of judgements be set before him; if he can, he will make a choice: if he cannot then he will remain in doubt. [C] Only fools have made up their minds and are certain: [Al] Che non men che saper dubbiar m’aggrada. [For doubting pleases me as much as knowing.]fn20 For if it is by his own reasoning that he adopts the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, they are no longer theirs: they are his. [C] To follow another is to follow nothing: ‘Non sumus sub rege: sibi quisque se vindicet.’ [We are under no king: let each man act freely.]fn21 Let him at least know what he does know. [A] He should not be learning their precepts but drinking in their humours. If he wants to, let him not be afraid to forget…

Location 1484

Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there: but then they make their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme or marjoram. Similarly the boy will transform his borrowings; he will confound their forms so that the end-product is entirely his: namely, his judgement, the…

Location 1495

Which tutor ever asks his pupil what he thinks about [B] rhetoric or grammar or [A] this or that statement of Cicero? They build them into our memory, panelling and all, as though they were oracles, in which letters and syllables constitute the actual substance. [C] ‘Knowing’ something does not mean knowing it by heart; that simply means putting it in the larder of our memory. That which we rightly ‘know’ can be deployed without looking back at the model, without turning our eyes back towards the book. What a wretched ability it is which is purely and simply bookish! Book-learning should serve as an ornament not as a foundation – following the conclusion of Plato that true philosophy consists in resoluteness, faithfulness and purity, whereas the other sciences, which have other aims, are merely cosmetic.

Location 1504

So are visits to foreign lands: but not the way the French nobles do it (merely bringing back knowledge of how many yards long the Pantheon is, or of the rich embroidery on Signora Livia’s knickers); nor the way others do so (knowing how much longer and fatter Nero’s face is on some old ruin over there compared with his face on some comparable medallion) but mainly learning of the humours of those peoples and of their manners, and knocking off our corners by rubbing our brains against other people’s.

Location 1515

it is a universally received opinion that it is not sensible to bring up a boy in the lap of his parents. Natural affection makes parents too soft, too indulgent – even the wisest of them. They are incapable of either punishing his faults or of bringing him up as roughly and as dangerously as he ought to be. They could not bear to see him riding back from his training all dirty and sweaty, [C] drinking this hot, drinking that cold, [A] nor to see him on a fractious horse, or up against a tough opponent foil in hand, nor with his first arquebus. But there is no other prescription: anyone who wants to be absolutely certain of making a real man of him must not spare his youth and must frequently flout the laws of medicine.

Location 1520

When athletes play the philosopher in endurance it is strength of muscle rather than strength of mind. Now learning to endure toil is learning to endure pain: ‘labor callum obducit dolori’ [toil puts callouses on our minds, against pain].fn25 Pain and discomfort in training are needed to break him in for the pain and discomfort of dislocated joints, of the stone and of cauterizings – and of dungeons and tortures as well, for, seeing the times we live in, those two may concern the good man as much as the bad.

Location 1534

Teach him a certain refinement in sorting out and selecting his arguments, with an affection for relevance and so for brevity.

Location 1556

let him be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether that truth is born at his rival’s doing or within himself from some change in his ideas. He will never be up in a pulpit reading out some prescribed text: he only has to defend a case when it has his approbation. He is not going to take up the kind of profession in which freedom to think again, or to admit mistakes, has been traded for ready cash. [C] ‘Neque, ut omnia que præscripta et imperata sint defendat, necessitate ulla cogitur.’ [He is under no obligation to support all precepts and assertions.]

Location 1557

let his virtue and his sense of right and wrong shine through it [C] and have no guide but reason. [A] Make him understand that confessing an error which he discovers in his own argument even when he alone has noticed it is an act of justice and integrity, which are the main qualities he pursues; [C] stubbornness and rancour are vulgar qualities, visible in common souls whereas to think again, to change one’s mind and to give up a bad case in the heat of the argument are rare qualities showing strength and wisdom.

Location 1568

I have known many witty remarks at the other end pass unnoticed. He will sound out the capacity of each person: of a herdsman, a mason, a wayfarer: he must use what he can get, take what a man has to sell and see that nothing goes wasted: even other people’s stupidity and weakness serve to instruct him. By noting each man’s endowments and habits, there will be engendered in him a desire for the good ones and a contempt for the bad.

Location 1574

By means of history he will frequent those great souls of former years. If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time: it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price – [C] the only study, Plato said, which the Spartans kept as their share.fn30 [A] Under this heading what profit will he not get out of reading the Lives of our favourite Plutarch! But let our tutor remember the object of his trust, which is less to stamp [C] the date of the fall of Carthage on the boy as the behaviour of Hannibal and Scipio; less to stamp [A] the name of the place where Marcellus died as how his death there showed him unworthy of his task. Let him not so much learn what happened as judge what happened.

Location 1585

There are in Plutarch developed treatises very worth knowing, for he is to my mind the master-craftsman at that job; but there are also hundreds of points which he simply touches on: he merely flicks his fingers towards the way we should go if we want to, or at times he contents himself with a quick shot at the liveliest part of the subject: those passages we must rip out and put out on display. [B] For example that one saying of his, ‘that the inhabitants of Asia were slaves of one tyrant because they were incapable of pronouncing one syllable: NO,’ may have furnished La Boëtie with the matter and moment of his book De la Servitude volontaire.fn31 [A] Seeing Plutarch select a minor action in the life of a man, or an apparently unimportant saying, is worth a treatise in itself. It is a pity that intelligent men are so fond of brevity: by it their reputation is certainly worth all the more, but we are worth all the less. Plutarch would rather we vaunted his judgement than his knowledge, and he would rather leave us craving for more than bloated. He realized that you could say too much even on a good subject, and that Alexandridas rightly criticized the orator whose address to the ephors was good but too long, saying, ‘Oh, Stranger, you say what you should, but not the way that you should!’fn32 [C] People whose bodies are too thin pad them out: those whose matter is too slender pad it out too, with words.

Location 1593

At the sight of our civil wars, who fails to exclaim that the world is turned upside down and that the Day of Judgement has got us by the throat, forgetting that many worse events have been known in the past and that, in thousands of parts of the world, they are still having a fine old time! [B] Personally I am surprised that our wars turn out to be so mild and gentle, given their unpunished licentiousness.

Location 1610

When the hail beats down on your head the entire hemisphere seems stormy and tempestuous. Like that peasant of Savoy who said that if only that silly King of France had known how to use his luck properly he could have become the Duke’s chief steward eventually! His mind could not conceive of any degree of grandeur above that of his Duke. [C] We are all caught in that same error without realizing it: a harmful error of great consequence. [A] Only a man who can picture in his mind the mighty idea of Mother Nature in her total majesty; who can read in her countenance a variety so general and so unchanging and then pick out therein not merely himself but an entire kingdom as a tiny, faint point: only he can reckon things at their real size. This great world of ours (which for some is only one species within a generic group) is the looking-glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves from the right slant.

Location 1613

So many revolutions, so many changes in the fortune of a state, teach us to realize that our own fortune is no great miracle. So many names, so many victories and conquests lying buried in oblivion, make it ridiculous to hope that we shall immortalize our names by rounding up ten armed brigands or by storming some hen-house or other known only by its capture. The proud arrogance of so many other nations’ pomp and the high-flown majesty of the grandeur of so many courts strengthen our gaze to look firmly and assuredly, without blinking, at the brilliance of our own. So many…

Location 1621

Our life, said Pythagoras,fn34 is like the vast throng assembled for the Olympic Games: some use their bodies there to win fame from the contests; others come to trade, to make a profit; still others – and they are by no means the worst – seek no other gain than to be spectators, seeing how everything is done and why;…

Location 1626

All the most profitable treatises of philosophy (which ought to be the touchstone and measure of men’s actions) can be properly reduced to examples. Teach the boy this: [B] quid fas optare, quid asper Utile nummus habet; patriæ charisque propinquis Quantum elargiri deceat: quem te Deus esse Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re; Quid sumus, aut quidnam victuri gignimur; [what he may justly wish for; that money is hard to earn and should be used properly; the extent of our duty to our country and to our dear ones; what God orders you to be, and what place He has assigned to you in the scheme of things; what we are and what we shall win when we have overcome;]fn35 teach him [A] what knowing and not knowing means (which ought to be the aim of study); what valour is, and justice and temperance; what difference there is between ordinate and inordinate aspirations; slavery and due subordination; licence and liberty; what are the signs of true and solid happiness; how far we should fear death, pain and shame: [B] Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem; [How we can flee from hardships and how we can endure them;]fn36 [A] what principles govern our emotions and the physiology of so many and diverse stirrings within us. For it seems to me that the first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should…

Location 1630

the greater part of the arts and sciences as now practised are of no practical use to us, and that, even in those which are useful, there are useless wastes and chasms which we would do better to leave where they are; following what Socrates taught, we should set limits to our study of subjects which lack utility. [A] sapere aude, Incipe: vivendi qui recte prorogat horam, Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum. [Dare to be wise. Start now. To put off the moment when you will start to live justly is to act like the bumpkin who would cross but who waits for the stream to dry up; time flows and will flow for ever, as an ever-rolling stream.]fn37 There is great folly in teaching our children [B] quid moveant Pisces, animosaque signa Leonis, Lotus et Hesperia quid Capricornus aqua, [what influences stem from Pisces and the lively constellation of Leo or from Capricorn which plunges into the Hesperian Sea,]fn38 about the heavenly bodies [A] and the motions of the Eighth Sphere before they know about their own properties. Tí πλειάδεσσι χάμοί; Tίδ ’άστράσι βοώτεω! [What do the Pleides or the Herdsman matter to me!]fn39 [C] Writing to Anaximenes, Pythagoras asked: ‘What mind am I supposed to bring to the secrets of the heavens, having death and slavery ever present before my eyes?’ (At that time the kings of Persia were preparing for war against his country.)fn40 We could all ask the same: ‘Assaulted as I am by ambition, covetousness, rashness and…

Location 1647

Oddly, things have now reached such a state that even among men of intelligence philosophy means something fantastical and vain, without value or usefulness, [C] both in opinion and practice. [A] The cause lies in chop-logic which has captured all the approaches. It is a great mistake to portray Philosophy with a haughty, frowning, terrifying face, or as inaccessible to the young. Whoever clapped that wan and frightening mask on her face! There is nothing more lovely, more happy and gay – I almost said more amorously playful. What she preaches is all feast and fun. A sad and gloomy mien shows you have mistaken her address.

Location 1676

philosophers were sitting together in the temple at Delphi one day. ‘Either I am mistaken,’ said Demetrius the grammarian, ‘or your calm happy faces show that you are not having an important discussion.’ One of them, Herakleon of Megara, retorted: ‘Furrowed brows are for grammarians telling us whether ballõ takes two ls in the future, researching into the derivation of the comparatives keiron and beltion and of the superlatives keiriston and beltiston: philosophical discussions habitually make men happy and joyful not frowning and sad.’fn42 [B] Deprendas animi tormenta latentis in ægro Corpore, deprendas et gaudia: sumit utrumque Inde habitum facies. [You can detect in a sickly body the hidden torments of the mind; you can detect her joys as well: the face reflects them both.]fn43

Location 1681

aim is virtue, which is not (as they teach in schools) perched on the summit of a steep mountain, rough and inaccessible. Those who have drawn nigh her hold that on the contrary she dwells on a beautiful plateau, fertile and strewn with flowers; from there she clearly sees all things beneath her; but if you know the road you can happily make your way there by shaded grassy paths, flower-scented, smooth and gently rising, like tracks in the vaults of heaven.fn46 This highest virtue is fair, triumphant, loving, as delightful as she is courageous, a professed and implacable foe to bitterness, unhappiness, fear and constraint, having Nature for guide, Fortune and Pleasure for her companions: those who frequent her not have, after their own weakness, fashioned an absurd portrait of her, sad, shrill, sullen, threatening and glowering, perching her on a rocky peak, all on her own among the brambles – a spectre to terrify people. This tutor of mine, who knows that his duty is to fill the will of his pupil with at least as much love as reverence for virtue, will know how to tell him that our poets are following commonplace humours: he will make him realize that the gods place sweat on the paths to the chambers of Venus rather than of Pallas.fn47

Location 1696

The tutor will then be teaching him a new lesson: what makes true virtue highly valued is the ease, usefulness and pleasure we find in being virtuous: so far from it being difficult, children can be virtuous as well as adults; the simple, as well as the clever. The means virtue uses is control not effort.

Location 1711

If Virtue should lack the ordinary share of good fortune, she evades or does without it, or else she forges a private happiness of her own, neither floating nor changeable. She knows how to be rich, powerful and learned and how to lie on a perfumed couch; she does love life; she does love beauty, renown and health. But her own peculiar office is to know how to enjoy those good things with proper moderation and how to lose them with constancy: an office much more noble than grievous; without it the whole course of our life becomes unnatural, troubled, deformed; then you can indeed tie it to those rocky paths, those brambles and those spectres.

Location 1718

our pupil’s disposition so bizarre that he would rather hear a tall story than the account of a great voyage or a wise discussion; that at the sound of the drum calling the youthful ardour of his comrades to arms he would turn aside for the drum of a troop of jugglers; that he would actually find it no more delightful and pleasant to return victorious covered with the dust of battle than after winning a prize for tennis or dancing: then I know no remedy except that his tutor should quickly strangle him when nobody is looking

Location 1723

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it? [B] Udum et molle lutum est; nunc nunc properandus et acri Fingendus sine fine rota. [The clay is soft and malleable. Quick! hurry to fashion it on that potter’s wheel which is for ever spinning.] [A] They teach us to live when our life is over. Dozens of students have caught the pox before they reach the lesson on temperance in their Aristotles. [C] Cicero said that even were he to live two men’s lives he would never find enough time to study the lyric poets.fn51 I find these chop-logic merchants even more gloomily useless. Our boy is too busy for that: to school-learning he owes but the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life: the rest is owed to action. Let us employ a time so short on things which it is necessary to know. [A] Get rid of those thorny problems of dialectics – they are trivial: our lives are never amended by them; take the simple arguments of philosophy:…

Location 1729

Aristotle never spent much of the time of his great pupil Alexander on the art of syllogisms nor on the principles of geometry: he taught him, rather, sound precepts concerning valour, prowess, greatness of soul and temperance, as well as that self-assurance which fears nothing. With such an armoury he sent him still a child to conquer the empire of the world with merely thirty thousand foot-soldiers, four thousand horsemen and forty-two thousand crowns. As for the other arts and sciences, Plutarch says that he held them in esteem, praising their…

Location 1741

Despite all this I do not want to imprison the boy.fn55 I do not want him to be left to the melancholy humour of a furious schoolmaster. I do not want to corrupt his mind as others do by making his work a torture, slaving away for fourteen or fifteen hours a day like a porter. [C] When you see him over-devoted to studying his books because of a solitary or melancholy complexion, it would not be good I find to encourage him in it: it unfits boys for mixing in polite society and distracts them from better things to do. And how many men have I known in my time made as stupid as beasts by an indiscreet hunger for knowledge! Carneades was turned so mad by it that he could not find time to tend to his hair or his nails.fn56

Location 1752

I have heard men of wisdom maintain that it is those colleges which parents send children to – and we have them in abundance – which make them so stupid.

Location 1762

The games and sports themselves will form a good part of his studies: racing, wrestling, [C] music-making, [A] dancing, hunting and the handling of arms and horses. I want his outward graces, his social ease [C] and his physical dexterity [A] to be moulded step by step with his soul. We are not bringing up a soul; we are not bringing up a body: we are bringing up a man. We must not split him into two. We must not bring up one without the other but, as Plato said, lead them abreast like a pair of horses harnessed together to the same shaft. [C] And does not Plato when you listen to him appear to devote more time and care to exercising the body, convinced that the mind may be exercised with the body but not vice versa?

Location 1778

This education is to be conducted, moreover, with a severe gentleness, not as it usually is.fn61 Instead of children being invited to letters as guests, all they are shown in truth are cruelty and horror. Get rid of violence and force: as I see it, nothing so fundamentally stultifies and bastardizes a well-born nature. If you want the boy to loathe disgrace and punishment do not harden him to them. Harden him to sweltering heat and to cold, to wind and sun and to such dangers as he must learn to treat with contempt. Rid him of all softness and delicacy about dress and about sleeping, eating and drinking. Get him used to anything. Do not turn him into a pretty boy or a ladies’ boy but into a boy who is fresh and vigorous. [C] Boy, man and now old man, I have always thought this. But I have always disliked, among other things, the way our colleges are governed. Their failure would have been less harmful, perhaps, if they had leant towards indulgence. They are a veritable gaol for captive youth. By punishing boys for depravity before they are depraved, you make them so. Go there during lesson time: you will hear nothing but the screaming of tortured children and of masters drunk with rage. What a way to awaken a taste for learning in those tender timorous souls, driving them to it with terrifying scowls and fists armed with canes! An iniquitous and pernicious system. And besides (as Quintilian justly remarked)fn62 such imperious authority can lead to dreadful consequences – especially given our form of flogging.

Location 1783

It is amazing how concerned Plato is in his Laws with the amusements and pastimes of the youths of his City and how he dwells on their races, sports, singing, capering and dancing, the control and patronage of which has been entrusted, he said, in antiquity to the gods, to Apollo, the Muses and Minerva. His care extends to over a hundred precepts for his gymnasia, yet he spends little time over book-learning; the only thing he seems specifically to recommend poetry for is the music.fn64

Location 1799

have often noted with great astonishment the extraordinary character of Alcibiades who, without impairing his health, could so readily adapt to diverse manners: at times he could outdo Persians in pomp and luxury; at others, Spartans in austerity and frugal living.fn66 He was a reformed man in Sparta, yet equally pleasure-seeking in Ionia: Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res. [On Aristippus any colour, rank or condition was becoming.] Thus would I fashion my pupil: quem duplici panno patientia velat Mirabor, vitæ via si conversa decebit, Personámque feret non inconcinnus utramqué. [One who is patiently clad in rags yet could also adapt to the opposite extreme, playing both roles becomingly: him I will admire.]fn67

Location 1820

‘God forbid,’ says someone in Plato,fn69 ‘that philosophy should mean learning a lot of things and then talking about the arts: ‘Hanc amplissimam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam vita magis quam literis persequuti sunt.’ [The fullest art of all – that of living good lives – they acquired more from life than from books.]

Location 1832

Diogenes was reproached for being ignorant yet concerned with philosophy. ‘My concern is all the more appropriate,’ he replied. When Hegesias begged him to read a certain book he replied, ‘How amusing of you! You prefer real figs to painted ones, so why not true and natural deeds to written ones?’

Location 1837

pupil will not say his lesson: he will do it. He will rehearse his lessons in his actions. You will then see whether he is wise in what he takes on, good and just in what he does, gracious and sound in what he says, resilient in illnesses, modest in his sports, temperate in his pleasures, [A] indifferent to the taste of his food, be it fish or flesh, wine or water; [C] orderly in domestic matters: ‘Qui disciplinam suam, non ostentationem scientiæ, sed legem vitæ putet, quique obtemperet ipse sibi, et decretis pareat’ [as a man who knows how to make his education into a rule of life not a means of showing off; who can control himself and obey his own principles].fn72 The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives.

Location 1840

The world is nothing but chatter: I have never met a man who does not say more than he should rather than less.

Location 1849

keep us four or five years learning the meanings of words and stringing them into sentences; four or five more in learning how to arrange them into a long composition, divided into four parts or five; then as many again in plaiting and weaving them into verbal subtleties. Let us leave all that to those who make it their express profession.

Location 1850

I sometimes hear people who apologize for not being able to say what they mean, maintaining that their heads are so full of fine things that they cannot deliver them for want of eloquence. That is moonshine. Do you know what I think? It is a matter of shadowy notions coming to them from some unformed concepts which they are unable to untangle and to clarify in their minds: consequently they cannot deliver them externally. They themselves do not yet know what they mean. Just watch them giving a little stammer as they are about to deliver their brain-child: you can tell that they have labouring-pains not at childbirth [C] but during conception! [A] They are merely licking an imperfect lump into shape.fn74 For my part I maintain – [C] and Socrates is decisive – [A] that whoever has one clear living thought in his mind will deliver it even in Bergamask.fn75 Or if he is dumb he will do so by signs. Verbaque prævisam rem non invita sequentur. [Once you have mastered the things the words will come freely.]fn76

Location 1859

[The things themselves ravish the words.]

Location 1872

‘But he does not know what an ablative is, a conjunctive, a substantive: he knows no grammar!’ Neither does his footman or a Petit-Pont fishwifefn79 yet they will talk you to death if you let them and will probably no more stumble over the rules of their own dialect than the finest Master of Arts in France.

Location 1873

That is what Menander replied when the day came for his promised comedy and people chided him for not yet putting it in hand: ‘It is already composed,’ he said. ‘All I have to do is to put it into verse.’fn86 Having thought the things through and arranged them in his mind, he attached little importance to the remainder. Since Ronsard and Du Bellay have brought renown to our French poetry, every little apprentice I know is doing more or less as they do, using noble words and copying their cadences.

Note: disagree. you only see it through externalizing it

Location 1900

Some people are so daft that they will go a mile or so out of their way to hunt for a good word: [C] ‘aut qui non verba rebus aptant, sed res extrinsecus arcessunt, quibus verba conveniant!’[they do not fit words to things but look for irrelevant things to fit to their words!] Or again: ‘Sunt qui alicujus verbi decore placentis vocentur ad id quod non proposuerant scribere.’[There are authors who are led by the beauty of some attractive word to write what they never intended.]fn90 I myself am more ready to distort a fine saying in order to patch it on to me than to distort the thread of my argument to go in search of one. [A] It is, on the contrary, for words to serve and to follow: if French cannot get there, let Gascon do so. I want things to dominate, so filling the thoughts of the hearer that he does not even remember the words. I like the kind of speech which is simple and natural, the same on paper as on the lip; speech which is rich in matter, sinewy, brief and short; [C] not so much titivated and refined as forceful and brusque – Haec demum sapiet dictio, quae feriet [The good style of speaking is the kind which strikes home]fn91 – [A] gnomic rather than diffuse, far from affectation, uneven, disjointed and bold – let each bit form a unity – not schoolmasterly, not monkish, not legalistic, but soldierly, rather as Sallust described Julius Caesar’s [C] (though I do not quite see why he did so).fn92 [B] I like to imitate the unruly negligence shown by French youth in the way they are seen to wear their clothes,fn93[C] with their mantles bundled round their neck, their capes tossed over one shoulder or [B] with a stocking pulled awry: it manifests a pride contemptuous of the mere externals of dress and indifferent to artifice. But I find it even better applied to speech. [C] All affectation is unbecoming in a courtier, especially given the hearty freedom of the French: and under a monarchy every gentleman is inevitably schooled in court manners. So we do well to lean towards the careless and natural. [A] I have no love for textures where the joins and seams all show (just as you ought not to be able to count the ribs or the veins in a beautiful body). [C] ‘Quae veritati operam dat oratio, incomposita sit et simplex.’ [Speech devoted to truth should be straightforward and plain.]fn94 ‘Quis accurate loquitur, nisi qui vult putide loqui?’ [Who can speak carefully unless he wants to sound affected?]fn95 When eloquence draws attention to itself it does wrong by the substance of things. Just as in dress it is the sign of a petty mind to seek to draw attention by some personal or unusual fashion, so too in speech; the search for new expressions and little-known words derives from an adolescent schoolmasterish ambition. If only I could limit myself to words used in Les Halles in Paris! That grammarian Aristophanes did not know the first thing about it when he criticized Epicurus for his simple words and for having perspicuity of language as his…

Note: suprising for montaigne given his diction and latin. the first puzzling contradiction for me

Location 1916

My late father, after having made all possible inquiries among the learned and the wise about the choicest form of education, was warned about the disadvantages of the current system: they told him that the length of time we spend learning languages, [C] which cost the Ancients nothing, [A] is the sole reason why we cannot attain to the greatness of mind and knowledge of those old Greeks and Romans. I do not believe that to be the sole reason. Nevertheless the expedient found by my father was to place me, while still at the breast and before my tongue was untied, in the care of a German (who subsequently died in France as a famous doctor); he was totally ignorant of our language but very well versed in Latin. He had been brought over expressly and engaged at a very high fee: he had me continuously on his hands. There were two others with him, less learned: their task was to follow me about and provide him with some relief. They never addressed me in any other language but Latin. As for the rest of the household, it was an inviolable rule that neither he nor my mother nor a manservant nor a housemaid ever spoke in my presence anything except such words of Latin as they had learned in order to chatter a bit with me. It is wonderful how much they all got from it. My father and my mother learned in this way sufficient Latin to understand it and acquired enough to be able to talk it when they had to, as did those other members of the household who were most closely devoted to my service. In short we became so latinized that it spilled over into the neighbouring villages, where, resulting from this usage, you can still find several Latin names for tools and for artisans. As for me, I was six years old before I knew French any more than I know the patois of Périgord or Arabic. And so, without art, without books, without grammar, without rules, without whips and without [C] tears,fn100 [A] I had learned Latin as pure as that which my schoolteacher knew – for I had no means of corrupting it or contaminating it. So if they wanted me to assay writing a prose (as other boys do in the colleges by translating from French) they had to give me some bad Latin to turn into good. And Nicholas Grouchy (who wrote De comitiis Romanorum), Guillaume Guerente (who wrote a commentary on Aristotle), George Buchanan, that great Scottish poet, [Al] Marc-Antoine Muret [C] whom France and Italy acknowledge to be the best prose-writer in his day, [A] who were my private tutors, have often told me that in my infancy I had that language so fluent and so ready that they were afraid to approach me.fn101

Location 1955

For among other things he had been counselled to bring me to love knowledge and duty by my own choice, without forcing my will, and to educate my soul entirely through gentleness and freedom. He was so meticulous about this that since some maintain that it disturbs the tender brains of children to wake them up with a start and to snatch them suddenly and violently out of their sleep (in which they are far more deeply plunged than we are) he would have me woken up by the sound of a musical instrument; [Al] and I was never without someone to do this for me.fn102

Location 1978

just as people who are frantic about finding a cure go and consult anybody, that good man was extremely frightened of failure in a matter which meant so much to him: he finally let himself be carried away by the common opinion (which always merely follows the leader as cranes do); he fell in with standard practice (no longer having about him the men who had given him his original educational ideas, which he had brought back from Italy) and sent me, at the age of six, to the Collège de Guyenne, then in full flourish as the best school in France. There too it is impossible to exaggerate the trouble he took over choosing good personal tutors for me and over all the other details of my education, preserving several idiosyncrasies opposed to the usual practices of the College. But for all that, it was still school. My Latin was at once corrupted and, since then, I have lost all use of it from lack of practice. And all my novel education merely served to enable me to stride right into the upper forms: I left College at thirteen, having ‘completed the course’ (as they put it); and in truth I now have nothing to show for it.

Location 1990

when I was about seven or eight I used to sneak away from all other joys to read it, especially since Latin was my mother-tongue and the Metamorphoses was the easiest book I knew and the one most suitable by its subject to my tender age. (As for Lancelot du lac, [B] Amadis, [A] Huon de Bordeaux and so on, trashy books which children spend time on, I did not even know their titles — and still do not know their insides — so exact was the way I was taught.)

Location 1998

For the chief qualities which my father looked for in those who had charge of me were affability and an easygoing complexion: and my own complexion had no vices other than sluggishness and laziness. The risk was not that I should do wrong but do nothing. Nobody forecast that I would turn out bad, only useless. What they foretold was idleness not wickedness.

Location 2006

I am aware that that is the way things have turned out. The complaints which ring in my ears confirm it: ‘Lazy! No warmth in his duties as friend, relation or public official! Too much on his own!’ Even the most insulting accusers never say, ‘Why did he go and take that?’ or ‘Why has he never paid up?’ What they say is, ‘Why will he not write it off?’ or ‘Why will he not give it away?’

Location 2009

Good governments take the trouble to bring their citizens together and to assemble them for sports and games just as they do for serious acts of worship: a sense of community and good-will is increased by this. And you could not allow citizens any amusements better regulated than those which take place in the presence of all and in full view of the magistrate. I would find it reasonable that the magistrate or the monarch should occasionally offer such amusements to the people for nothing, with a kind of fatherly goodness and affection, [C] and that in the bigger towns there should be places set aside and duly appointed for such spectacles, which would be a diversion from worse and secret goings-on.

Location 2034

Now, to get back to my subject, there is nothing like tempting the boy to want to study and to love it: otherwise you simply produce donkeys laden with books. They are flogged into retaining a pannierful of learning; but if it is to do any good, Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.

Location 2039

[Curiosity when applied to strange or miraculous events is both vain and arrogant. Since men are lulled by habit, they cease to wonder at the glory of the heavens yet they claim to know the limits of the whole order of Nature – and so to judge from their own parochial experience what is miraculous and what is not. Only the authority of the Church and of God’s saints can recognize miracles for what they are and vouch for them. Once the Church has decided any issue of fact or doctrine, Roman Catholics must never deviate from her teachings. A man may reject her authority altogether, but he is not free to pick and choose among doctrines, especially during discussions with heretics.]

Note: montaigne not a true heretic

Location 2043

The more empty a soul is and the less furnished with counterweights, the more easily its balance will be swayed under the force of its first convictions.

Location 2053

if I heard tell of ghosts walking or of prophecies, enchantments, sorcery, or some other tale which I could not get my teeth into – Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas, Nocturnos lemures portentaque Thessala [Dreams, magic terrors, miracles, witches, nocturnal visits from the dead or spells from Thessaly]fn2 – I used to feel sorry for the wretched folk who were taken in by such madness. Now I find that I was at least as much to be pitied as they were. It is not that experience has subsequently shown me anything going beyond my original beliefs (nor is it from any lack of curiosity on my part), but reason has taught me that, if you condemn in this way anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible, you are claiming to know the frontiers and bounds of the will of God and the power of Nature our Mother; it taught me also that there is nothing in the whole world madder than bringing matters down to the measure of our own capacities and potentialities.

Location 2057

If we consider that we have to grope through a fog even to understand the very things we hold in our hands, then we will certainly find that it is not knowledge but habit which takes away their strangeness; [B] jam nemo, fessus satiate videndi, Suspicere in cæli dignatur lucida templa; [Already now, tired and satiated with seeing, nobody bothers to gaze up at the shining temples of the heavens;] [A] such things, if they were newly presented to us, would seem as unbelievable as any others; si nunc primum mortalibus adsint Ex improviso, ceu sint objecta repente, Nil magis his rebus poterat mirabile dici, Aut minus ante quod auderent fore credere gentes. [supposing that now, for the first time, they were suddenly shown to mortal men: nothing could be called more miraculous; such things the nations would not have dared to believe.]

Note: if habit relinquishes the strange, then to attune our life towards wonder is to risk the truly unpredictable each day

Location 2067

Such a great saint as Augustine swears that he saw:fn12 a blind child restored to sight by the relics of Saint Gervaise and Saint Protasius at Milan; a woman in Carthage cured of a cancer by the sign of the cross made by a woman who had just been baptized; his close friend Hesperius driving off devils (who were infesting his house) by using a little soil taken from the sepulchre of our Lord, and that same soil, borne into the Church, suddenly curing a paralytic; a woman who, having touched the reliquary of Saint Stephen with a posy of flowers during a procession, rubbed her eyes with them afterwards and recovered her sight which she had recently lost – as well as several other miracles which occurred in his presence. What are we to accuse him of – him and the two holy bishops, Aurelius and Maximinus, whom he calls on as witnesses? Is it of ignorance, simple mindedness, credulity, deliberate deception or imposture? Is there any man in our century so impudent as to think he can be compared with them for virtue, piety, scholarship, judgement and ability? [C] ‘Qui, ut rationem nullam afferent, ipsa authoritate me frangerent.’ [Why, even if they gave no reasons, they would convince me by their very authority.]

Location 2110

Now it seems to me that what brings as much disorder as anything into our consciences during our current religious strife is the way Catholics are prepared to treat some of their beliefs as expendable. They believe they are being moderate and well-informed when they surrender to their enemies some of the articles of faith which are in dispute. But, apart from the fact that they cannot see what an advantage you give to an adversary when you begin to yield ground and beat a retreat, or how much that excites him to follow up his attack, the very articles which they select as being less weighty are sometimes extremely important ones. We must either totally submit to the authority of our ecclesiastical polity or else totally release ourselves from it. It is not for us to decide what degree of obedience we owe to it.

Note: hobbes

Location 2123

in the past I made use of that freedom of personal choice and private selection in order to neglect certain details in the observances of our Church because they seemed to be rather odd or rather empty; then, when I came to tell some learned men about it, I discovered that those very practices were based on massive and absolutely solid foundations, and that it is only our ignorance and animal-stupidity which make us treat them with less reverence than all the rest.

Location 2129

Vainglory and curiosity are the twin scourges of our souls. The former makes us stick our noses into everything: the latter forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.

Location 2133

This discovery of a boundless territory seems to me worthy of reflection. I am by no means sure that some other land may not be discovered in the future, since so many persons, [C] greater than we are, [A] were wrong about this one! I fear that our eyes are bigger than our bellies, our curiosity morefn3 than we can stomach. We grasp at everything but clasp nothing but wind.

Location 2154

The other testimony from Antiquity which some would make relevant to this discovery is in Aristotle – if that little book about unheard wonders is really his.fn8 He tells how some Carthaginians struck out across the Atlantic beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, sailed for a long time and finally discovered a large fertile island entirely clothed in woodlands and watered by great deep rivers but very far from any mainland; they and others after them, attracted by the richness and fertility of the soil, emigrated with their wives and children and started living there. The Carthaginian lords, seeing that their country was being gradually depopulated, expressly forbade any more to go there on pain of death and drove out those new settlers, fearing it is said that they would in time increase so greatly that they would supplant them and bring down their State.

Location 2188

I wish everyone would write only about what he knows – not in this matter only but in all others. A man may well have detailed knowledge or experience of the nature of one particular river or stream, yet about all the others he knows only what everyone else does; but in order to trot out his little scrap of knowledge he will write a book on the whole of physics! From this vice many great inconveniences arise.

Location 2203

I find (from what has been told me) that there is nothing savage or barbarous about those peoples, but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything! Those ‘savages’ are only wild in the sense that we call fruits wild when they are produced by Nature in her ordinary course: whereas it is fruit which we have artificially perverted and misled from the common order which we ought to call savage.

Location 2206

All our strivings cannot even manage to reproduce the nest of the smallest little bird, with its beauty and appropriateness to its purpose; we cannot even reproduce the web of the wretched spider. [C] Plato says that all things are produced by nature, fortune or art, the greatest and fairest by the first two, the lesser and least perfect by the last.fn10 [A] Those peoples, then, seem to me to be barbarous only in that they have been hardly fashioned by the mind of man, still remaining close neighbours to their original state of nature. They are still governed by the laws of Nature and are only very slightly bastardized by ours; but their purity is such that I am sometimes seized with irritation at their not having been discovered earlier, in times when there were men who could have appreciated them better than we do. It irritates me that neither Lycurgus nor Plato had any knowledge of them, for it seems to me that what experience has taught us about those peoples surpasses not only all the descriptions with which poetry has beautifully painted the Age of Goldfn11 and all its ingenious fictions about Man’s blessed early state, but also the very conceptions and yearnings of philosophy. They could not even imagine a state of nature so simple and so pure as the one we have learned about from experience; they could not even believe that societies of men could be maintained with so little artifice, so little in the way of human solder. I would tell Plato that those people have no trade of any kind, no acquaintance with writing, no knowledge of numbers, no terms for governor or political superior, no practice of subordination or of riches or poverty, no contracts, no inheritances, no divided estates, no occupation but leisure, no concern for kinship – except such as is common to them all – no clothing, no agriculture, no metals, no use of wine or corn. Among them you hear no words for treachery, lying, cheating, avarice, envy, backbiting or forgiveness. How remote from such perfection would Plato find that Republic which he thought up – [C] ‘viri a diis recentes’ [men fresh from the gods].

Location 2220

They were so horror-struck by the first man who brought a horse there and rode it that they killed him with their arrows before they could recognize him, even though he had had dealings with them on several previous voyages.

Location 2244

They get up at sunrise and have their meal for the day as soon as they do so; they have no other meal but that one. They drink nothing with it, [B] like those Eastern peoples who, according to Suidas,fn15 only drink apart from meals. [A] They drink together several times a day, and plenty of it. This drink is made from a certain root and has the colour of our claret. They always drink it lukewarm; it only keeps for two or three days; it tastes a bit sharp, is in no ways heady and is good for the stomach; for those who are not used to it it is laxative but for those who are, it is a very pleasant drink. Instead of bread they use a certain white product resembling coriander-cakes. I have tried some: it tastes sweet and somewhat insipid.

Location 2249

In the morning, before their meal, one of their elders walks from one end of the building to the other, addressing the whole barnful of them by repeating one single phrase over and over again until he has made the rounds, their building being a good hundred yards long. He preaches two things only: bravery before their enemies and love for their wives. They never fail to…

Location 2256

They believe in the immortality of the soul: souls which deserve well of the gods dwell in the sky where the sun rises; souls which are accursed dwell where it sets. They have some priests and prophets or other, but they rarely appear among the people since they live in the mountains. When they…

Location 2262

He foretells what is to happen and the results they must expect from what they undertake; he either incites them to war or deflects them from it, but only on condition that if he fails to divine correctly and if things turn out other than he foretold, then – if they can catch him – he is condemned as a false prophet and hacked to pieces. So the prophet who gets it wrong once is seen no more. [C] Prophecy is a gift of God.fn16 That is why abusing it should be treated as a punishable deceit. Among the Scythians,…

Location 2267

These peoples have their wars against others further inland beyond their mountains; they go forth naked, with no other arms but their bows and their wooden swords sharpened to a point like the blades of our pigstickers. Their steadfastness in battle is astonishing and always ends in killing and bloodshed: they do not even know the meaning of fear or flight. Each man brings back the head of the enemy he has slain and sets it as a trophy over the door of his dwelling. For a long period they treat captives well and provide them with all the comforts which they can devise; afterwards the master of each captive summons a great assembly of his acquaintances; he ties a rope to one of the arms of his prisoner [C] and holds him by it, standing a few feet away for fear of being caught in the blows, [A] and allows his dearest friend to hold the prisoner the same way by the other arm: then, before the whole assembly, they both hack at him with their…

Location 2275

It does not sadden me that we should note the horrible barbarity in a practice such as theirs: what does sadden me is that, while judging correctly of their wrong-doings we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; more barbarity in lacerating by rack and torture a body still fully able to feel things, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by pigs and dogs (as we have not only read about but seen in recent memory, not among enemies in antiquity but among…

Location 2287

Yet no opinion has ever been so unruly as to justify treachery, disloyalty, tyranny and cruelty, which are everyday vices in us. So we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism. Their warfare is entirely noble and magnanimous; it has as much justification and beauty as that human malady allows: among them it has no other foundation than a zealous concern for courage. They are not striving to conquer new lands, since without toil or travail they still enjoy that bounteous Nature who furnishes them abundantly with all they need, so that they have no concern to push back their frontiers. They are still in that blessed state of desiring nothing beyond what is ordained by their natural necessities: for them anything further is merely superfluous. The generic term which they use for men of the same age is ‘brother’; younger men they call ‘sons’. As for the old men, they are the ‘fathers’ of everyone else; they bequeath all their goods, indivisibly, to all these heirs in common, there being no other entitlement than that with which Nature purely and simply endows all her creatures by bringing them into this world.

Location 2299

Quite enough of the advantages we do gain over our enemies are mainly borrowed ones not truly our own. To have stronger arms and legs is the property of a porter not of Valour; agility is a dead and physical quality, for it is chance which causes your opponent to stumble and which makes the sun dazzle him; to be good at fencing is a matter of skill and knowledge which may light on a coward or a worthless individual. A man’s worth and reputation lie in the mind and in the will: his true honour is found there. Bravery does not consist in firm arms and legs but in firm minds and souls: it is not a matter of what our horse or our weapons are worth but of what we are. The man who is struck down but whose mind remains steadfast, [C] ‘si succiderit, de genu pugnat’ [if his legs give way, then on his knees doth he fight];fn25 [B] the man who relaxes none of his mental assurance when threatened with imminent death and who faces his enemy with inflexible scorn as he gives up the ghost is beaten by Fortune not by us: [C] he is slain but not vanquished.fn26

Location 2326

Sometimes it is the bravest who may prove most unlucky. [C] So there are triumphant defeats rivalling victories; Salamis, Plataea, Mycale and Sicily are the fairest sister-victories which the Sun has ever seen, yet they would never dare to compare their combined glory with the glorious defeat of King Leonidas and his men at the defile of Thermopylae.fn27 Who has ever run into battle with a greater desire and ambition for victory than did Captain Ischolas when he was defeated? Has any man ever assured his safety more cleverly or carefully than he assured his destruction?fn28 His task was to defend against the Arcadians a certain pass in the Peleponnesus. He realized that he could not achieve this because of the nature of the site and of the odds against him, concluding that every man who faced the enemy must of necessity die in the battlefield; on the other hand he judged it unworthy of his own courage, of his greatness of soul and of the name of Sparta to fail in his duty; so he chose the middle path between these two extremes and acted thus: he saved the youngest and fittest soldiers of his unit to serve for the defence of their country and sent them back there. He then determined to defend that pass with men whose loss would matter less and who would, by their death, make the enemy purchase their breakthrough as dearly as possible. And so it turned out. After butchering the Arcadians who beset them on every side, they were all put to the sword. Was ever a trophy raised to a victor which was not better due to those who were vanquished? True victory lies in your role in the conflict, not in coming through safely: it consists in the honour of battling bravely not battling through.

Location 2335

‘These sinews,’ he said, ‘this flesh and these veins – poor fools that you are – are your very own; you do not realize that they still contain the very substance of the limbs of your forebears: savour them well, for you will find that they taste of your very own flesh!’ There is nothing ‘barbarous’ in the contriving of that topic. Those who tell how they die and who describe the act of execution show the prisoners spitting at their killers and pulling faces at them. Indeed, until their latest breath, they never stop braving them and defying them with word and look. It is no lie to say that these men are indeed savages – by our standards; for either they must be or we must be: there is an amazing gulf between their [C] souls [A] and ours.fn29

Location 2352

husbands have several wives: the higher their reputation for valour the more of them they have. One beautiful characteristic of their marriages is worth noting: just as our wives are zealous in thwarting our love and tenderness for other women, theirs are equally zealous in obtaining them for them. Being more concerned for their husband’s reputation than for anything else, they take care and trouble to have as many fellow-wives as possible, since that is a testimony to their husband’s valour.

Location 2358

Now I know enough about poetry to make the following judgement: not only is there nothing ‘barbarous’ in this conceit but it is thoroughly anacreontic.fn31

Location 2374

The King had a long interview with them: they were shown our manners, our ceremonial and the layout of a fair city. Then someone asked them what they thought of all this and wanted to know what they had been most amazed by. They made three points; I am very annoyed with myself for forgetting the third, but I still remember two of them. In the first place they said (probably referring to the Swiss Guard) that they found it very odd that all those full-grown bearded men, strong and bearing arms in the King’s entourage, should consent to obey a boy rather than choosing one of themselves as a Commander; secondly – since they have an idiom in their language which calls all men ‘halves’ of one another – that they had noticed that there were among us men fully bloated with all sorts of comforts while their halves were begging at their doors, emaciated with poverty and hunger: they found it odd that those destitute halves should put up with such injustice and did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.

Location 2381

What I consider wrong is our usual practice of trying to support and confirm our religion by the success or happy outcome of our undertakings. Our belief has enough other foundations without seeking sanction from events: people who have grown accustomed to such plausible arguments well-suited to their taste are in danger of having their faith shaken when the turn comes for events to prove hostile and unfavourable.

Location 2413

The evil methods which men use to get ahead in our century clearly show that their aims cannot be worth much.

Location 2449

The means of doing good or evil can be found anywhere, but if that quip of Bias is true, that ‘the evil form the larger part’, or what Ecclesiasticus says, ‘One good man in a thousand have I not found’fn3 – [B] Rari quippe boni: numero vix sunt totidem, quot Thebarum portæ, vel divitis ostia Nili. [Good men are rare: just about as many as gates in the walls of Thebes or mouths to the fertile Nile.] – [A] then contagion is particularly dangerous in crowds. Either you must loathe the wicked or imitate them. It is dangerous both to grow like them because they are many, or to loathe many of them because they are different.

Location 2451

It is not that a wise man cannot live happily anywhere nor be alone in a crowd of courtiers, but Bias says that, if he has the choice, the wise man will avoid the very sight of them. If he has to, he will put up with the former, but if he can he will choose the other. He thinks that he is not totally free of vice if he has to contend with the vices of others.

Note: emerson link

Location 2464

There is hardly less torment in running a family than in running a whole country.

Location 2473

Socrates was told that some man had not been improved by travel. ‘I am sure he was not,’ he said. ‘He went with himself!’fn10 Quid terras alio calentes Sole mutamus? patria quis exul Se quoque fugit? [Why do we leave for lands warmed by a foreign sun? What fugitive from his own land can flee from himself?]fn11 If you do not first lighten yourself and your soul of the weight of your burdens, moving about will only increase their pressure on you, as a ship’s cargo is less troublesome when lashed in place. You do more harm than good to a patient by moving him about: you shake his illness down into the sack, [Al] just as you drive stakes in by pulling and waggling them about. [A] That is why it is not enough to withdraw from the mob, not enough to go to another place: we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession.

Location 2486

[But if our breast remains unpurged, what unprofitable battles and tempests we must face, what bitter cares must tear a man apart, and then what fears, what pride, what sordid thoughts, what tempers and what clashes; what gross gratifications; what sloth!]

Location 2506

It is in our soul that evil grips us: and she cannot escape from herself: In culpa est animus qui se non effugit unquam. [That mind is at fault which never escapes from itself.]fn14

Location 2509

Now since we are undertaking to live, without companions, by ourselves, let us make our happiness depend on ourselves; let us loose ourselves from the bonds which tie us to others; let us gain power over ourselves to live really and truly alone – and of doing so in contentment.

Location 2513

We should have wives, children, property and, above all, good health … if we can: but we should not become so attached to them that our happiness depends on them. We should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum. Within it our normal conversation should be of ourselves, with ourselves, so privy that no commerce or communication with the outside world should find a place there; there we should talk and laugh as though we had no wife, no children, no possessions, no followers, no menservants, so that when the occasion arises that we must lose them it should not be a new experience to do without them. We have a soul able to turn in on herself; she can keep herself company; she has the wherewithal to attack, to defend, to receive and to give. Let us not fear that in such a solitude as that we shall be crouching in painful idleness: [B] in solis sis tibi turba locis. [in lonely places, be a crowd unto yourself.]

Location 2525

‘Virtue,’ says Antisthenes, ‘contents herself, without regulations, words or actions.’ [A] Not even one in a thousand of our usual activities has anything to do with our self. That man you can see over there, furiously beside himself, scrambling high up on the ruins of that battlement, the target of so many volleys from harquebuses; and that other man, all covered with scars, wan, pale with hunger, determined to burst rather than open the gate to him: do you think they are in it for themselves? It could well be for someone they have never seen, someone plunged meanwhile in idleness and delights, who takes no interest in what they are doing. And this man over here, rheumy, filthy and blear-eyed, whom you can see coming out of his work-room at midnight! Do you think he is looking in his books for ways to be better, happier, wiser? Not a bit. He will teach posterity how to scan a verse of Plautus and how to spell a Latin word, or else die in the attempt. Is there anyone not willing to barter health, leisure and life itself against reputation and glory, the most useless, vain and counterfeit coinage in circulation? Our own deaths have never frightened us enough, so let us burden ourselves with fears for the deaths of our wives, children and servants. Our own affairs have never caused us worry enough, so let us start cudgelling and tormenting our brains over those of our neighbours and of those whom we love.

Location 2534

[C] It seems to me that solitude is more reasonable and right for those who, following the example of Thales, have devoted to the world their more active, vigorous years. [A] We have lived quite enough for others: let us live at least this tail-end of life for ourselves. Let us bring our thoughts and reflections back to ourselves and to our own well-being. Preparing securely for our own withdrawal is no light matter: it gives us enough trouble without introducing other concerns. Since God grants us leave to make things ready for our departure, let us prepare for it; let us pack up our bags and take leave of our company in good time; let us disentangle ourselves from those violent traps which pledge us to other things and which distance us from ourselves. We must unknot those bonds and, from this day forth, love this or that but marry nothing but ourselves. That…

Location 2548

It is time to slip our knots with society now that we can contribute nothing to it. A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing. Our powers are failing: let us draw them in and keep them within ourselves. Whoever can turn round the duties of love and fellowship and pour them into himself should do so. In that decline which makes a man a useless encumbrance importunate to others, let him avoid becoming an encumbrance, importunate and useless to himself. Let him pamper himself, cherish himself, but above all control himself, so respecting his reason and so fearing his conscience that he cannot stumble in their presence without shame: ‘Rarum est enim ut satis se quisque vereatur.’ [It is rare for anybody to respect himself enough.]fn20 Socrates says that…

Location 2556

those busy active minds which welcome everything with open arms, which take on everything, get carried away about everything and which are always giving themselves, offering themselves, putting themselves forward. When any good things happen to come to us from outside we should make use of them, so long as they remain pleasurable; we must not let them become our principal base, for they are no such thing: neither reason nor…

Location 2566

My taste is quite unsuited to managing my estates: those who do like it, should do it in moderation: Conentur sibi res, non se submittere rebus. [They should try to subordinate things to themselves, not themselves to things.]fn23 Otherwise management, as Sallust puts it, is a servile task.fn24 (Some aspects of it are more acceptable, such as an interest in gardening – which Xenophon attributes to Cyrus.)fn25 A mean can be found between that base unworthy anxiety, full of tension and worry, seen in those who immerse themselves in it, and that profound extreme neglect one sees in others, who let everything go to rack and ruin: Democriti pecus edit agellos Cultaque, dum peregre est animus sine corpore velox. [Democritus left his herds to ravage fields and crops, while his speeding soul was wandering outside his body.]fn26 But let us just listen to the advice about solitude which Pliny the Younger gave to his friend Cornelius Rufus: ‘I counsel you in that ample and thriving retreat of yours, to hand the degrading and abject care of your estates over to those in your employ, and to devote yourself to the study of letters so as to derive from it something totally your own.’fn27 By that, he means a good reputation, his humour being similar to Cicero’s who said he wanted to use his withdrawal and his repose from the affairs of State to gain life everlasting through his writings! [B] Usque adeo ne Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter? [Does knowing mean nothing to you, unless somebody else knows that you know it?]fn28

Location 2595

Spending time with books has its painful side like everything else and is equally inimical to health, which must be our main concern; we must not let our edge be blunted by the pleasure we take in books: it is the same pleasure as destroys the manager of estates, the miser, the voluptuary and the man of ambition.

Location 2624

Books give pleasure: but if frequenting them eventually leads to loss of our finest accomplishments, joy and health, then give up your books. I am one who believes that their fruits cannot outweigh a loss such as that.

Location 2630

Whether we are running our home or studying or hunting or following any other sport, we should go to the very boundaries of pleasure but take good care not to be involved beyond the point where it begins to be mingled with pain. We should retain just enough occupations and pursuits to keep ourselves fit and to protect ourselves from the unpleasantness which comes in the train of that other extreme: slack and inert idleness.

Location 2638

"Walking in silence through the healthy woods, pondering questions worthy of the wise and good."

Location 2645

If it depended on me I would like to see Christians saying the Lord’s Prayer as a grace before and after meals, when we get up and go to bed and on all those special occasions where we normally include prayers, [C] saying it always if not exclusively. [A] The Church may lengthen or vary prayers according to her need to instruct us; for I am well aware that the matter is identical and always substantially the same. But this prayer ought to have the prerogative of being on people’s lips at all times, since it is certain that it says everything necessary and that it is always most appropriate on all occasions. [C] It is the only prayer that I say everywhere; instead of varying it I repeat it. That explains why it is the only prayer I can ever remember.

Location 2702

In his Laws, Plato lists three kinds of belief which are insulting to the gods: that there are none; that they do not concern themselves with our affairs; that they never refuse to answer our prayers, oblations and sacrifices. He believes that the first error never remains stable in anyone from childhood to old age but that the other two do allow of constancy.fn5

Location 2714

The position of a man who mingles devotion with a detestable life seems somehow to deserve condemnation more than that of a man who is self-consistent, dissolute in everything.

Location 2726

it displeases me to see a man making three signs of the cross at the Benedicite and three more at grace – displeasing me all the more since [C] it is a sign which I revere and continually employ, not least when I yawn – [B] onlyfn9 to see him devoting every other hour of the day to [C] hatred, covetousness and injustice.fn10 [B] Give vices their hours, then one hour to God – a sort of barter or arrangement! What a miracle it is to see actions so incompatible proceeding at so even a course that at the very point where they pass from one to the other you can notice no break or hesitation.

Location 2729

lechery,

Location 2736

And what about those men whose whole life reposes on the fruits and profits of what they know to be a mortal sin? How many trades and vocations are there which gain acceptance, yet whose very essence is vicious?

Location 2739

then there is the man who confided to me how, all his life, he had professed and practised a religion which he believed to be damnable, quite opposite to the one dear to him, so as not to lose favour or the honour of his appointments. How did he defend such reasoning in his mind? When men address God’s Justice on such matters, what do they say? Since their repentance requires a visible and tangible reparation, they forfeit all means of pleading it before God or men. Do they go so far as to dare to beg forgiveness without making satisfaction, without repentance? I hold that the first ones I mentioned are in the same state as these; but their obstinacy is far less easy to overcome.

Location 2741

It is not without good reason, it seems to me, that the Church has forbidden the indiscriminate, thoughtless and indiscreet use of those venerable sacred songs which the Holy Ghost dictated through David.fn11 We must only bring God into our activities with reverence and attentiveness full of honour and respect. That Word is too holy to serve merely to exercise our lungs and to please our ears; it must be rendered by our hearts not by our tongues. It is unreasonable to permit some shop-boy to amuse himself playing about with it while his mind is on silly frivolous matters. [B] Nor, certainly, is it right to see the Sacred Book of the holy mysteries of our faith dragged about through hall or kitchenfn12 – [C] they used to be mysteries: now they serve as amusements and pastimes.

Location 2753

It is not a story to be told but a story to be reverenced, feared, adored.

Location 2764

And might it not be said, apparently reasonably, that a decree forbidding anyone to write about religion (except very reservedly) unless expressly professing to do so would not lack some image of usefulness and justice – as perhaps would one requiring me too to hold my peace on the subject?

Location 2814

I believe there is a treatise in Xenophon somewhere in which he shows that we ought to pray to God less often, since it is not easy for us to bring our souls so frequently into that controlled, reformed and supplicatory state needed to do so; without that, our prayers are not only vain and useless: they are depraved.

Location 2820

cogitations!

Location 2839

concupiscence,

Location 2862

And those who keep themselves going with the thought that some span of life or other which they call ‘natural’ promises them a few years more could only do so provided that there was some ordinance exempting them personally from those innumerable accidents (which each one of us comes up against and is subject to by nature) which can rupture the course of life which they promise themselves. What madness it is to expect to die of that failing of our powers brought on by extreme old age and to make that the target for our life to reach when it is the least usual, the rarest kind of death. We call that death, alone, a natural death, as if it were unnatural to find a man breaking his neck in a fall, engulfed in a shipwreck, surprised by plague or pleurisy, and as though our normal condition did not expose us to all of those harms. Let us not beguile ourselves with such fine words: perhaps we ought, rather, to call natural anything which is generic, common to all and universal. Dying of old age is a rare death, unique and out of the normal order and therefore less natural than the others. It is the last, the uttermost way of dying; the farther it is from us, the less we can hope to reach it; it is indeed the limit beyond which we shall not go and which has been prescribed by Nature’s law as never to be crossed: but it is a very rare individual law of hers which makes us last out till then. It is an exemption which she grants as an individual favour to one man in the space of two or three centuries, freeing him from the burden of those obstacles and difficulties which she strews along the course of that long progress.

Location 2885

[When the body is shattered by the mighty blows of age and our limbs shed their blunted powers, our wits too become lame and our tongues and our minds start to wander.]

Note: Lucretius, III

Location 2923

Those who strive to account for a man’s deeds are never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one whole and to show them under one light, since they commonly contradict each other in so odd a fashion that it seems impossible that they should all come out of the same shop.

Location 2937

Everything is so full of such examples (indeed each man can furnish so many from himself) that I find it strange to find men of understanding sometimes taking such trouble to match up the pieces, seeing that vacillation seems to me to be the most common and blatant defect of our nature:

Location 2943

Augustus did get away from them: for there is in that man throughout his life a diversity of actions so clear, so sudden and so uninterrupted that they had to let him go in one piece, with no verdict made on him by even the boldest judges.

Location 2952

It is difficult to pick out more than a dozen men in the whole of Antiquity who groomed their lives to follow an assured and definite course, though that is the principal aim of wisdom. To sum it all up and to embrace all the rules of Man’s life in one word, ‘Wisdom,’ said an Ancient, ‘is always to want the same thing, always not to want the same thing.’

Location 2955

I was once taught indeed that vice is no more than a defect and irregularity of moderation, and that consequently it is impossible to tie it to constancy. There is a saying attributed to Demosthenes: the beginning of all virtue is reflection and deliberation: its end and perfection, constancy. If by reasoning we were to adopt one definite way, the way we chose would be most beautiful of all; but nobody has thought of doing that. Quod petiit, spernit, repetit quod nuper omisit; Æstuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto. [Judgement scorns what it yearned for, yearns again for what it recently spurned; it shifts like the tide and the whole of life is disordered.]fn4

Location 2959

normal fashion is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, left and right, up and down, as the winds of occasion bear us along. What we want is only in our thought for the instant that we want it: we are like that creature which takes on the colour of wherever you put it. What we decided just now we will change very soon; and soon afterwards we come back to where we were: it is all motion and inconstancy: Ducimur ut nervis alienis mobile lignum. [We are led like a wooden puppet by wires pulled by others.]

Location 2966

[A] It would be easy enough to explain the character of such a man; that can be seen from the Younger Cato: strike one of his keys and you have struck them all; there is in him a harmony of sounds in perfect concord such as no one can deny.

Location 2985

Antigonus had grown to love one of his soldiers for his virtue and valour and ordered his doctors to treat him for a malignant internal complaint which had long tormented him; he noticed that, once the soldier was cured, he set about his work with much less ardour and asked him who had changed him into such a coward. ‘You yourself, Sire,’ he replied, ‘by freeing me from the weight of those pains which made me think life was worth nothing.’fn7

Location 2996

That man you saw yesterday so ready to take risks: do not think it odd if you find him craven tomorrow. What had put heart into his belly was anger, or need, or his fellows, or wine, or the sound of a trumpet. His heart had not been fashioned by reasoned argument: it was those factors which stiffened it; no wonder then if he has been made quite different by other and contrary factors.

Location 3013

Not only does the wind of chance events shake me about as it lists, but I also shake and disturb myself by the instability of my stance: anyone who turns his prime attention on to himself will hardly ever find himself in the same state twice. I give my soul this face or that, depending upon which side I lay it down on. I speak about myself in diverse ways: that is because I look at myself in diverse ways. Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute: timid, insolent; [C] chaste, lecherous; [B] talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull; brooding, affable; lying, truthful; [C] learned, ignorant; generous, miserly and then prodigal – [B] I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgement this whirring about and this discordancy. There is nothing I can say about myself as a whole simply and completely, without intermingling and admixture. The most universal article of my own Logic is DISTINGUO.fn11

Location 3019

That is why one courageous action must not be taken as proof that a man really is brave; a man who is truly brave will always be brave on all occasions. If a man’s valour were habitual and not a sudden outburst it would make him equally resolute in all eventualities: as much alone as with his comrades, as much in a tilt-yard as on the battlefield; for, despite what they say, there is not one valour for the town and another for the country. He would bear with equal courage an illness in his bed and a wound in battle, and would no more fear dying at home than in an attack. We would never see one and the same man charging into the breach with brave assurance and then raging like a woman over the loss of a lawsuit or a son. [C] If he cannot bear slander but is resolute in poverty; if he cannot bear a barber-surgeon’s lancet but is unyielding against the swords of his adversaries, then it is not the man who deserves praise but the deed. Cicero says that many Greeks cannot even look at an enemy yet in sickness show constancy: the Cimbrians and the Celtiberians on the contrary; ‘nihil enim potest esse cequabile, quod non a certa ratione proficiscatur.’ [For nothing can be called constant which does not arise out of a fixed principle.]fn12

Location 3030

We are fashioned out of oddments put together – [C] ‘voluptatem contemnunt, in dolore sunt molliores; gloriam negligunt, franguntur infamia’ [they despise pleasure but are rather weak in pain; they are indifferent to glory, but are broken by disgrace]fn14 – [A] and we wish to win honour under false flags. Virtue wants to be pursued for her own sake: if we borrow her mask for some other purpose then she quickly rips it off our faces. Virtue, once the soul is steeped in her, is a strong and living dye which never runs without taking the material with her. That is why to judge a man we must follow his tracks long and carefully. If his constancy does not rest firmly upon its own foundations; [C] ‘cui vivendi via considerata atque provisa est’;[the path which his life follows having been thought about and prepared for beforehand;] [A] if various changes make him change his pace – I mean his path, for his pace may be hastened by them or made heavy and slow – then let him go free,fn15 for that man will always ‘run with the wind’, A vau le vent, as the crest of our Lord Talbot puts it.

Location 3045

Anyone who has not groomed his life in general towards some definite end cannot possibly arrange his individual actions properly. It is impossible to put the pieces together if you do not have in your head the idea of the whole. What is the use of providing yourself with paints if you do not know what to paint? No man sketches out a definite plan for his life; we only determine bits of it. The bowman must first know what he is aiming at: then he has to prepare hand, bow, bowstring, arrow and his drill to that end. Our projects go astray because they are not addressed to a target. No wind is right for a seaman who has no predetermined harbour.

Location 3055

We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people. [C] ‘Magnam rem puta unum hominem agere’ [Let me convince you that it is a hard task to be always the same man.]fn19 [A] Since ambition can teach men valour, temperance and generosity – and, indeed, justice; since covetousness can plant in the mind of a shop-boy, brought up in obscurity and idleness, enough confidence to cast himself on the mercy of the waves and angry Neptune in a frail boat, far from his hearth and home, and also teach him discernment and prudence; and since Venus herself furnishes resolution and hardiness to young men still subject to correction and the cane, and puts a soldier’s heart into girls still on their mothers’ knees: [B] Hac duce, custodes furtim transgressa jacentes, Ad Juvenem tenebris sola puella venit: [With Venus as her guide, the maiden, quite alone, comes to the young man, sneaking carefully through her sleeping guardians:]fn20 it is not the act of a settled judgement to judge us simply by our outward deeds: we must probe right down inside and find out what principles make things move; but since this is a deep and chancy undertaking, I would that fewer people would concern themselves with it.

Location 3067

It is dangerous to confound the rank and importance of sins: murderers, traitors and tyrants gain too much by it. It is not reasonable that they should be able to salve their consciences because somebody else is lazy, lascivious or not assiduous in his prayers. Each man comes down heavily on his neighbours’ sins and lessens the weight of his own. Even the doctors of the Church often rank sins badly to my taste. [C] Just as Socrates said that the prime duty of wisdom is to distinguish good from evil,fn2 we, whose best always partakes of vice, should say the same about knowing how to distinguish between the vices: if that is not done exactingly, the virtuous man and the vicious man will be jumbled unrecognizedly together.

Location 3096

Josephusfn6 tells how he wheedled secrets out of an ambassador sent to him by his enemies by making him drink a lot.

Location 3118

towards Castres, near Bordeaux, where her house is, there was a village woman, a widow of chaste reputation, who, becoming aware of the first hints that she might be pregnant, told the women of the neighbourhood that if only she had a husband she would think she was expecting. But as the reason for her suspicions grew bigger every day and finally became evident, she was reduced to having a declaration made from the pulpit in her parish church, stating that if any man would admit what he had done she promised to forgive him and, if he so wished, to marry him. One of her young farm-labourers took courage at this proclamation and stated that he had found her one feast-day by her fireside after she had drunk her wine freely; she was so deeply and provocatively asleep that he had been able to have her without waking her up. They married each other and are still alive.

Note: virgin birth

Location 3138

Even among the best regulated and best governed peoples it was very common to assay men by making them drunk. I have heard one of the best doctors in Paris, Silvius, state that it is a good thing once a month to arouse our stomachs by this excess so as to stop their powers from getting sluggish and to stimulate them in order to prevent their growing dull. [B] And we can read that the Persians discussed their most important affairs after drinking wine.fn15

Location 3155

[C] A man advanced in years and rank told me that he counted drink among the three main pleasures left to him in this life.fn16 But he set about it in the wrong way; for fine palates and an anxious selecting of wine are to be absolutely avoided. If you base your pleasure on drinking good wine you are bound to suffer from sometimes drinking bad. Your taste ought to be more lowly and more free. To be a good drinker you must not have too tender a palate. The Germans enjoy drinking virtually any wine. Their aim is to gulp it rather than to taste it. They get a better bargain. Their pleasure is more abundant and closer at hand.

Location 3163

I have seen in my time a great lord, a person famous for his successes in several expeditions of high importance, who effortlessly and in the course of his ordinary meals never drank less than two gallons of wine and who, after that, never showed himself other than most sage and well-advised in the conduct of our affairs.

Location 3170

It is wonderful what accounts I heard my father give of the chastity of his times. He had the right to say so, as he was both by art and nature most graceful in the company of ladies. He talked little and well; he intermingled his speech with elegant references to books in the vernacular, especially Spanish, and among the Spanish he frequently cited the so-called Marco Aurelio.fn17 His face bore an expression of gentle seriousness, humble and very modest; he took particular care to be respectable and decent in his person and his dress both on horse and on foot. He was enormously faithful to his word and, in all things, conscientious and meticulous, tending rather towards over-scrupulousness. For a small man he was very strong, straight and well-proportioned; his face was pleasing and rather brown; he was skilled and punctilious in all gentlemanly sports. I have also seen some canes filled with lead with which he is said to have exercised his arms for throwing the bar and the stone or for fencing, as well as shoes shod with lead to improve his running and jumping. Folk recall little miracles of his at the long-jump. When he was over sixty I remember him laughing at our own agility by vaulting into the saddle in his furry gown, by putting his weight on his thumb and leaping over a table and by never going up to his room without jumping three or four steps at a time. But more to my subject, he said that there was hardly one woman of quality in the whole province who was ill-spoken of, and he would tell of men – especially himself – who were on remarkably intimate terms with decent women without a breath of suspicion. In his own case he solemnly swore that he came virgin to his marriage-bed; and yet he had long done his bit in the transalpine wars, leaving a detailed diary of events there, both public and personal. And he married on his return from Italy in 1528 at the mature age of thirty-three. Let us get back to our bottles.

Location 3178

Plato forbids young people to drink before the age of eighteen and to get drunk before forty. But men over forty he tells to enjoy it and to bring copiously into their banquets the influence of Dionysius, that kind god who restores gaiety to grown men and youth to the old ones, who calms and softens the passions of the soul just as iron is softened by the fire. And in his Laws he considers convivial drinking to be useful (provided that the group has a leader to ensure that order is maintained), since getting drunk is a good and certain trial of each man’s character and, at the same time, has the property of giving older men the idea of enjoying themselves in music and dancing, useful pastimes which they would not dare to engage in when of settled mind. Wine also has the capacity of tempering the soul and giving health to the body. Nevertheless he liked the following restrictions, partly borrowed from the Carthaginians: that it should be done without on military expeditions; that all statesmen and judges should abstain when about to perform their duties and to deliberate on matters of public concern; that the daytime should be avoided – that is owed to other activities – as well as any night when we intend to beget children.fn19

Location 3202

Do they think that an apoplexy will not make Socrates lose his wits as much as a porter? Some have forgotten their own names by the force of an illness, and a light wound has struck down the judgement of others. A man can be as wise as he likes: he is still a man; and what is there more frail, more wretched, more a thing of nothing, than man? Wisdom cannot force our natural properties: [B] Sudores itaque et pallorem existere toto Corpore, et infringi linguam, vocemque aboriri, Caligare oculos, sonere aures, succidere artus, Denique concidere ex animi terrore videmus. [Then we see sweat and pallor take over his whole body, his tongue grows incoherent, his voice fails, his eyes are troubled, his ears begin to ring, his legs give way and he falls to the ground, as panic seizes his mind.]fn22 [A] When he is threatened with a blow nothing can stop a man closing his eyes, or trembling if you set him on the edge of a precipice, [C] just like a child, Nature reserving to herself these signs of her authority, signs slight but unattackable by reason or Stoic virtue, in order to teach Man that he is mortal and silly. [A] He becomes livid with fear; he reddens with shame; he bewails an attack of colic paroxysms if not with a loud cry of despair at least with a cry which is broken and wheezing. Humani a se nihil alienum putet! [Let him realize that nothing human is a stranger to him!]fn23

Location 3222

When we hear such Stoic paradoxes as, ‘I would rather be raging mad than a voluptuary’ [C] – that is the saying of Antisthenes,fn30 [A] Mavείειv μάλλοv ή ήΟείειv – when Sextius tells us that he would rather be transfixed by pain than by pleasure; when Epicurus decides to treat gout as though it were tickling him, refuses rest and good health, light-heartedly defies ills and, despising less biting pains, will not condescend to struggle in combat against them but summons and even wishes for pains which are strong and anguishing and worthy of him: Spumantemque dari pecora inter inertia votis Optat aprum, aut fulvum descendere monte leonem; [Amidst his placid flock he prays to be vouchsafed some slavering boar, or that some wild lion will come down from the mountain;]fn31 who does not conclude that those are the cries of a mind which is leaping out of its lodgings? Our Soul cannot reach so high while remaining in her own place. She has to leave it and rise upwards and, taking the bit between her teeth, bear her man off, enrapture him away so far that afterwards he is amazed by what he has done; just as in war, the heat of the combat often makes the valiant soldiers take such hazardous steps that they are the first to be struck with astonishment once they have come back to themselves; so too the poets are often seized by amazement by their own works and no longer recognize the defiles through which they had passed at so fine a gallop. In their case too it is called frenzy and mania. And just as Plato says that a sedate man knocks in vain at poetry’s door, so too Aristotle says that no outstanding soul is free from a mixture of folly.fn32 He is right to call folly any leap – however praiseworthy it might be – which goes beyond our reason and our discourse. All the more so in that wisdom is a controlled handling of our soul, carried out, on our Soul’s responsibility, with measure and proportion.

Location 3259

Plato contends that the faculty of prophesying is ‘above ourselves’; that we must be ‘outside ourselves’ when we accomplish it; our prudence must be darkened by some sleep or illness, or else snatched out of its place by a heavenly rapture.fn33

Location 3276

The worst of these wars is that the cards are so mixed up, with your enemy indistinguishable from you by any clear indication of language or deportment, being brought up under the same laws, manners and climate, that it is not easy to avoid confusion and disorder. That made me fear that I myself would come upon our own troops in a place where I was not known, be obliged to state my name and wait for the worst. [B] That did happen to me on another occasion: for, from just such a mishap, I lost men and horses. Among others, they killed one of my pages, pitifully: an Italian of good family whom I was carefully training; in him was extinguished a young life, beautiful and full of great promise.

Location 3289

x

Location 3321

can say that I have walked more firmly through some dangers by reflecting on the secret knowledge I had of my own will and the innocence of my designs.

Location 3326

It was a melancholy humour (and therefore a humour most inimical to my natural complexion) brought on by the chagrin caused by the solitary retreat I plunged myself into a few years ago, which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.fn1

Location 3388

It is [C] the only book of its kind in the world, [A] in its conception wild and [C] fantastically eccentric.fn2 [A] Nothing in this work of mine is worthy of notice except that bizarre quality, for the best craftsman in the world would not know how to fashion anything remarkable out of material so vacuous and base.

Location 3391

I praise God, Madame, that your love has been so well employed. For the great hopes of himself raised by your boy, Monsieur d’Estissac, amply assure us that when he comes of age you will be rewarded by the duty and gratitude of an excellent son.fn4 But he is still a child, unable to appreciate the innumerable acts of devotion he has received from you: so I should like him, if this book should fall into his hands one day, to be able to learn something from me at a time when I shall not even have a mouth to tell it to him – something I can vouch for quite truthfully and which will be made even more vigorcusly evident, God willing, by the good effects he will be aware of in himself: namely, that there is no nobleman in France who owes more to his mother than he does, and that in the future he will be able to give no more certain proof of his goodness and virtue than by acknowledging your qualities.

Note: post-death goals

Location 3402

[C] To which we may add a consideration taken from Aristotle,fn5 that anyone who does a kindness to another loves him more than he is loved in return; that anyone to whom a debt is owed feels greater love than the one by whom the debt is owed; and that every creator loves what he has made more than it would love him if it were capable of emotions.

Location 3413

For my part, those propensities which are produced in us without the command and mediation of our judgement taste strangely flat. In the case of the subject under discussion, I am incapable of finding a place for that emotion which leads people to cuddle new-born infants while they are still without movements of soul or recognizable features of body to make themselves lovable. [C] And I have never willingly allowed them to be nursed in my presence. [A] A true and well-regulated affection should be born, and then increase, as children enable us to get to know them; if they show they deserve it, we should cherish them with a truly fatherly love, since our natural propensity is then progressing side by side with reason; if they turn out differently, the same applies, mutatis mutandis: we should, despite the force of Nature, always yield to reason.

Note: conditional

Location 3424

we feel ourselves more moved by the skippings and jumpings and babyish tricks of our children than by their activities when they are fully formed, as though we had loved them not as human beings but only as playthings [C] or as pet monkeys. [A] Some fathers will give them plenty of toys when they are children but will resent the slightest expenditure on their needs once they have come of age. It even looks, in fact, as if we are jealous of seeing them cut a figure in the world, able to enjoy it just when we are on the point of leaving it, and that this makes us miserly and close-fisted towards them: it irritates us that they should come treading on our heels, [C] as if to summon us to take our leave. [A] Since in sober truth things are so ordered that children can only have their being and live their lives at the expense of our being and of our lives, we ought not to undertake to be fathers if that frightens us.

Note: on baby fetish

Location 3430

I find it cruel and unjust not to welcome them to a share and fellow-interest in our property – giving them full knowledge of our domestic affairs as co-partners when they are capable of it – and not to cut back on our own interests, economizing on them so as to provide for theirs, since we gave them birth for just such a purpose. It is unjust to see an aged father, [B] broken [A] and only half alive,fn6 stuck in his chimney-corner with the absolute possession of enough wealth to help and maintain several children, allowing them all this time to waste their best years without means of advancement in the public service and of making themselves better known.

Location 3437

If anyone then tells me, as a very intelligent nobleman once did, that the only practical advantage he wanted to get from saving up all his money was to be honoured and courted by his children (since now that age had deprived him of strength that was the only remedy he had left against being treated with neglect and contempt by everybody, and so maintaining his authority over his family – [C] and truly, not only old age but all forms of weakness are, according to Aristotle, great encouragements to miserliness)fn7 – [A] then there is something in that. But it is medicine to cure an illness the birth of which ought to have been prevented. A father is wretched indeed if he can only hold the love of his children – if you can call it love – by making them depend on his help. We should make ourselves respected for our virtues and our abilities and loved for our goodness and gentlemanliness. The very ashes of a rare timber have their value, and we are accustomed to hold in respect and reverence the very bones and remains of honourable people. In the case of someone who has lived his life honourably, no old age can be so decrepit and smelly that it ceases to be venerable – especially to the children, whose souls should have been instructed in their duty not by need and want, nor by harshness nor force, but by reason: et errat longe, mea quidem sententia, Qui imperium credat esse gravius aut stabilius Vi quod fit, quam illud quod amicitia adjungitur. [if you ask my opinion, it is quite untrue that authority is firmer or more stable when it relies on force than when it is associated with affection.]fn8

Note: respect of values

Location 3454

I hold that you will never achieve by force what you cannot achieve by reason, intelligence and skill.fn9

Note: applies not just to violence, but coersion

Location 3470

I would have been even more punctilious with boys, who are less bom to serve and whose mode-of-being is freer: I would have loved to make their hearts overflow with openness and frankness. I have never seen caning achieve anything except making souls more cowardly or more maliciously stubborn.

Location 3477

let us within reason enrich their lives with whatever we have at our disposal. To achieve that we ought not to get married so young that our adult years almost become confounded with theirs. Such unseemliness can plunge us into many great difficulties – I mean especially in the case of the nobility, whose way of life is one of leisure and who can live, as we say, on their income. In other cases, where life is a struggle for money, the fellowship of a great many children is a help to the whole family; they are so many new ways and means of helping to enrich it. [B] I was thirty-three when I married; and I approve of thirty-five – the opinion attributed to Aristotle. [C] Plato does not want any man to marry before thirty; he is also right to laugh at spouses who lie together after fifty-five, judging their offspring unworthy to live and eat.fn12 It was Thales who gave the right ages; his mother pressed him to get married when he was young: ‘Too soon,’ he said. When he was older: ‘Too late!’ Accept no time as opportune for any inopportune activity! [A] The Ancient Gauls reckoned it to be extremely reprehensible for a man to lie with a woman before he was twenty, particularly advising those who wanted to train for war to remain chaste well into adulthood, [Al] because sexual intercourse makes minds soft and deflects them.

Note: contrast to marriage and childrens in 20s as a 20th century norm

Location 3482

In a certain province in the Spanish Indies men were allowed to marry only after forty, yet girls could marry at ten.fn15

Note: history of age gaps

Location 3501

If a nobleman is only thirty-five it is too soon for him to make way for a twenty-year-old son: he has still got to achieve a reputation in military expeditions or at the Court of his monarch: he needs his cash; he should allow his son a share but not forget himself. Such a man can rightly give the answer which fathers often have on their lips: ‘I have no wish to be stripped bare before I go and lie down.’ But a father who is brought low by age and illness, whose weakness and ill-health deprive him of ordinary human fellowship, does wrong to himself and to his family if he broods over a great pile of riches. If he is wise, he has reached the period when he really ought to want to get stripped and lie down – not stripped to his shirt but down to a nice warm dressing-gown. He has no more use for all the remaining pomp: he should give it all away as a present to those whom it ought to belong to by Nature’s ordinance.

Location 3503

This defect of not realizing in time what one is, of not being aware of the extreme decline into weakness which old age naturally brings to our bodies and our souls – to them equally in my opinion unless the soul actually has the larger share – has ruined the reputation of most of the world’s great men. I have seen in my lifetime and intimately known great men in authority who had clearly declined amazingly from their former capacities, which I knew of from the reputation they had acquired in their better years. For their honour’s sake I would deeply have wished that they had withdrawn to their estates, dropping the load of public or military affairs which were no longer meant for their shoulders.

Note: age denial vs early retirement

Location 3517

I have always thought that it must be a great happiness for an old father to train his own children in the management of his affairs; he could then, during his lifetime, observe how they do it, offering advice and instruction based on his own experience in such things, and personally arranging for the ancient honour and order of his house to come into the hands of his successors, confirming in this way the hopes he could place in their future management of them.

Location 3532

I would try to have gentle relations with my children and so encourage in them an active love and unfeigned affection for me, something easily achieved in children of a well-born nature; of course if they turn out to be wild beasts [C] (which our century produces in abundance) [A] then you must hate them and avoid them as such.

Note: combine with earlier note on conditionality

Location 3545

Even if I were able to make myself feared I would rather make myself loved.fn22 [B] There are so many drawbacks in old age, so much powerlessness; it so merits contempt that the best endowment it can acquire is the fond love of one’s family: its arms are no longer fear and commands. I know one man who had a most imperious youth. Now that old age is coming upon him, despite trying to accept it as well as he can, he slaps and bites and swears – [C] the stormiest master in France; [B] he frets himself with cares and watchfulness: but it is all a farce which the family conspire in; the others have access to the best part of his granary, his cellar and even his purse: meanwhile he keeps the keys in his pouch, dearer to him than sight itself. While he is happy to keep so spare and thrifty a table, in various secret places in his house all is dissipation, gambling, prodigality and tales about his fits of temper and his precautions. Everybody is on the lookout against [C] him.fn23 [B] If some wretched servant happens to become devoted to him, suspicion is immediately thrown on to him – a quality which old age is only too ready to ruminate upon. How many times has that man boasted to me of keeping his family on a tight rein, of the meticulous obedience and reverence he received because of it, and of the lucid watch he kept over his affairs: Ille solus nescit omnia! [He alone is unaware of the lot!]fn24

Location 3555

Does my Lord strike a bargain and send a missive which the family do not like? They suppress it, sometimes inventing afterwards reasons to explain the lack of action or reply. Since no letters from outside are ever brought to him first, he only sees the ones which it seems convenient for him to know. If he happens to get hold of any, he always has to rely on somebody else to read them for him, so they invent things on the spot: they are always pretending that someone is begging his pardon in the very letter that contains abuse. In short he sees his affairs only through some counterfeit image designed to be as pleasing to him as they can make it so as not to awake his spleen or his anger.

Note: reliance

Location 3575

The late Monsieur de Monluc, the Marshal, when talking to me of the loss of his son (a truly brave gentleman of great promise who died on the island of Madeira), among other regrets emphasized the grief and heartbreak he felt at never having revealed himself to his son and at having lost the pleasure of knowing and savouring him, all because of his fancy to appear with the gravity of a stern father; he had never told him of the immense love he felt for him and how worthy he rated him for his virtue. ‘And all that poor boy saw of me,’ he said, ‘was a frowning face full of scorn; he is gone, believing I was unable to love him or to judge him as he deserved. Whom was I keeping it for, that knowledge of the special love I harboured for him in my soul! Should not he have felt all the pleasure of it, and all the bonds of gratitude? I forced myself, I tortured myself, to keep up that silly mask, thereby losing the joy of his company – and his goodwill as well, which must have been cold towards me: he had never received from me anything but brusqueness or known anything but a tyrannous façade.’

Location 3606

when we lose those we love there is no consolation sweeter than the knowledge of having remembered to tell them everything and to have enjoyed the most perfect and absolute communication with them. [B] As much as I can I open myself to my own folk, and am most ready to tell them or anyone else what I intend towards them and what is the judgement I make on them. I hasten to reveal myself, to make myself known, for I do not want them to be misled about me in any way whatsoever.

Location 3615

are a little too fond of male entail; we foresee a ridiculous eternity for our family name and attach too much weight to silly conjectures about the future based on the minds of little boys.

Location 3649

Now once we consider the fact that we love our children simply because we begot them, calling them our second selves, we can see that we also produce something else from ourselves, no less worthy of commendation: for the things we engender in our soul, the offspring of our mind, of our wisdom and talents, are the products of a part more noble than the body and are more purely our own. In this act of generation we are both mother and father; these ‘children’ cost us dearer and, if they are any good, bring us more honour. In the case of our other children their good qualities belong much more to them than to us: we have only a very slight share in them; but in the case of these, all their grace, worth and beauty belong to us. For this reason they have a more lively resemblance and correspondence to us. [C] Plato adds that such children are immortal and immortalize their fathers – even deifying them, as in the case of Lycurgus, Solon and Minos.fn34

Note: link children to art as plst-death meaning

Location 3692

Labienus could not bear such a loss nor survive such beloved offspring; he had himself borne to the family vault on a litter and shut up alive; there he provided his own death and burial. It is difficult to find any example of fatherly love more vehement than that one. When his very eloquent friend Cassius Severus saw those books being burnt, he shouted that he too ought to be burnt alive with them since he actively preserved their contents in his memory.

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Lucan was a good man, condemned by that blackguard Nero; in the last moments of his life, when most of his blood had already gushed from his veins (he had ordered his doctors to kill him by slashing them) and when cold had already seized his hands and feet and was starting to draw near to his vital organs, the very last thing he remembered were some verses from his Pharsalian War; he recited them, and died with them as the last words on his lips. Was that not saying farewell to his children tenderly and paternally, the equivalent of those adieus and tender embraces which we keep for our children when we die, as well as being an effect of that natural instinct to recall at our end those things which we held dearest to us while we lived? When Epicurus lay dying, tormented they say by the most extreme colic paroxysms, he found consolation only in the beauty of the philosophy he had taught to the world;fn38 are we to believe that he would have found happiness in any number of well-born, well-educated children (if he had had any) to equal what he found in the abundant writing which he had brought forth? And if he had had the choice of leaving either an ill-conceived and deformed child behind him or a stupid and inept book, would – not he alone but any man of similar ability – have preferred to incur the first tragedy rather than the other? It would probably have been impious of Saint Augustine (for example) if someone had obliged him to destroy either his children (supposing he had had any) or else his writings (from which our religion receives such abundant profit) and he had not preferred to destroy his children.fn39

Note: hardcore

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As for this present child of my brain, what I give it I give unconditionally and irrevocably, just as one does to the children of one’s body; such little good as I have already done it is no longer mine to dispose of; it may know plenty of things which I know no longer, and remember things about me that I have forgotten; if the need arose to turn to it for help, it would be like borrowing from a stranger. It is richer than I am, yet I am wiser than it.

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I very much doubt whether Phidias or any other outstanding sculptor would have found as much delight in the survival and longevity of his physical children as in some excellent piece of sculpture brought to completion by his long-sustained labour and his skill according to the rules of his art.

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A man who, from a naturally easy-going gentleness, would despise injuries done to him would do something very beautiful and praiseworthy; but a man who, stung to the quick and ravished by an injury, could arm himself with the arms of reason against a frenzied yearning for vengeance, finally mastering it after a great struggle, would undoubtedly be doing very much more. The former would have acted well: the latter, virtuously; goodness is the word for one of these actions; virtue, for the other; for it seems that virtue presupposes difficulty and opposition, and cannot be exercised without a struggle. That is doubtless why we can call God good, mighty, bountiful and just, but we cannot call him virtuous: his works are his properties and cost him no struggle.

Note: effort matters

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Among the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers there were, I say, many who judged that it was not sufficient to have our soul in a good state, well under control and ready for virtue; that it was not sufficient to have our powers of reason and our thoughts above all the strivings of Fortune, but that we must do more, seeking occasions to put them to the test. They wish to go looking for pain, hardship and contempt, in order to combat them and to keep our souls in fighting trim: [C] ‘multum sibi adjicit virtus lacessita.’ [virtue gains much by being put to the proof.]fn3

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to act well when danger threatened, was the proper duty of a virtuous man.fn5 Those words of Metellus show us clearly what I wanted to prove: that virtue rejects ease as a companion, and that the gentle easy slope up which are guided the measured steps of a good natural disposition is not the path of real virtue. Virtue demands a rough and thorny road:fn6 she wants either external difficulties to struggle against (which was the way of Metellus) by means of which Fortune is pleased to break up the directness of her course for her, or else inward difficulties furnished by the disordered passions [C] and imperfections [A] of our condition.

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the soul of Socrates, which is the most perfect to have come to my knowledge, would be by my reckoning a soul with little to commend it, for I cannot conceive in that great man any onslaught from vicious desires. I cannot imagine any difficulty or any constraint in the progress of his virtue; I know that his reason was so powerful and sovereign within him that it would never have even let a vicious desire be born in him. I cannot put anything face to face with so sublime a Virtue as his: it seems I can see her striding victoriously and triumphantly along, stately and at her ease, without let or hindrance. If Virtue can only be resplendent when fighting opposing desires are we therefore to say that she cannot manage without help from vice, to whom she at least owes the fact that she is held in esteem and honour?

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So are we to say that the ease with which Cato died, and that power which he acquired by the strength of his soul to do so without difficulty, should somehow dim the splendour of his virtue? And who among those whose brain is even slightly tinged with true philosophy can be satisfied with imagining a Socrates merely free from fear and anguish when his lot was prison, shackles and a verdict of guilty? And who fails to recognize in him not merely firmness and constancy (that was his ordinary state) but some new joy and a playful rapture in his last words and ways? [C] When he scratched his leg after the shackles were off he trembled with pleasure: does that not suggest a similar sweet joy in his Soul at being unshackled from her past hardships and capable of entering into a knowledge of things to come? [A] Cato must please forgive me: his death is more taut and more tragic but Socrates’ is somehow even more beautiful. [C] To those who deplored it, Aristippus replied: ‘May the gods send me one like it!’fn11

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It was no longer a painful virtue nor a virtue ordained by reason, virtues which they had to stiffen their souls to maintain: it was the very

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