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- Author: Michel Montaigne
- Full Title: The Complete Essays
- Category: #books
- He does not crush his reader under the authority of the great philosophers: he tries out their opinions and sees whether they work for him or for others. For he knew that opinions are not certainties, and that most human ‘certainties’ are in fact opinions.
- But for Montaigne no author ever definitively banished or superseded any other; authors are not infallible; they can help us make ‘assays’ but they resolve nothing. Even the sage whom Montaigne most admired, Socrates, is eventually stripped of that saintly authority that Erasmus vested him with.
- As a philosopher Montaigne was not concerned with being dead but with bearing with wisdom and fortitude the pain of dying as the soul is, often excruciatingly, released from its body. Not that Montaigne disbelieved in the afterlife, but the splendour of the rewards awaiting redeemed Christian souls and, unimaginably, their bodies, is a matter of theology not of reasoned deduction or induction. The Christian heaven can only be imagined as unimaginable, thought of as unthinkable: to make that point authoritatively Montaigne based his case on the words of St Paul: Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the hearts of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. 3
- Everything is secundum quid, ‘according to something’. Montaigne wishes to be judged, he says, ‘selon moy’, that is ‘secundum me’, ‘in accordance with myself’, ‘according to my standards’. If a man insists upon living in court he will have to dodge about and use his elbows, living ‘according to this, according to that and according to something else’. The wiser man will live (in harmony with creation, of which he knows he forms a part) secundum naturam, ‘according to nature’. All schools of philosophy tell him to do so, but none now tells him how to do so, having obscured Nature’s footsteps with their artifice. As always art or artifice is the antithesis of nature.
- [B] Books and places which I look at again always welcome me with a fresh new smile.
- There is an old Greek saying that men are tormented not by things themselves but by what they think about them.
- Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.
- I was led to do this deed (which is so foreign to my nature) by a rash and troubled humour. I am opposed to all feigned and subtle actions; I hate sleight of hand not only in games but even when it serves a purpose. The way is vicious even if the deed is not.
- Mothers think their boys are playing when they see them wring the neck of a chicken or find sport in wounding a dog or a cat. Some fathers are so stupid as to think that it augurs well for a martial spirit if they see their son outrageously striking a peasant or a lackey who cannot defend himself, or for cleverness when they see him cheat a playmate by some cunning deceit or a trick. Yet those are the true seeds by which cruelty, tyranny and treachery take root; they germinate there and then shoot up and flourish, thriving in the grip of habit. And it is a most dangerous start to education to make excuses for such low tendencies because of the weakness of childhood or the unimportance of the subject. In the first place, it is Nature speaking, whose voice is then all the more loud and clear for being yet unbroken. Secondly, the ugliness of cheating does not depend on the difference between money and counters: it depends on the cheating.
- Everywhere and in everything my own eyes suffice to keep me to my duty; no eyes watch me more closely: there are none I regard more highly.
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- Note: This was the great discovery I backed into when I started to question external authority, e.g. church elders. Why was it better to submit (in their sense) to them when it was impossible that they understand my situation as well as I did myself?
- If (as those of us have been led to do who make a study of ourselves) each man, on hearing a wise maxim, immediately looked to see how it properly applied to him, he would find that it was not so much a pithy saying as a whiplash applied to the habitual stupidity of his faculty of judgement. But the counsels of Truth and her precepts are taken to apply to the generality of men, never to oneself: we store them up in our memory not in our manners, which is most stupid and unprofitable.
- Note: How many sermons have been heard in exactly this manner?
- Contrary to other people, I always despise that Art when I am well but never make a truce with it when I am ill: I then begin to hate it and to fear it. I tell those who urge me to take medicine at least to wait until I am well and have got my strength back in order to have the means of resisting the hazardous effects of their potions. I let Nature run her course: I take it for granted that she is armed with teeth and claws to protect herself from attacks launched against her, so maintaining our fabric and avoiding its disintegration. Instead of going to her help when she is wrestling at close grips with the illness, I fear we help her adversary instead and load extra tasks upon her.
- there is no doubt that it was fairer and nobler in the one who was offended not to act otherwise but to forgive. If it turned out badly for the first of them that is no reason to condemn his good intention; and we do not know, even if he had taken the opposite decision, that he would have escaped the end to which his destiny called him; but he would have lost the glory of such a memorable good deed.
- Issuing invitations to the hands of an enemy is a rather rash decision, yet I believe it would be better to take it than to remain in a continual sweat over an outcome which cannot be remedied. But since such provisions as we can make are full of uncertainty and anguish, it is better to be ready to face with fair assurance anything that can happen, while drawing some consolation from not being sure that it will.
- Yet how it can happen that a soul enriched by so much knowledge should not be more alert and alive, or that a grosser, commonplace spirit can without moral improvement lodge within itself the reasonings and judgements of the most excellent minds which the world has ever produced: that still leaves me wondering.
- While on this subject, when Agesilaus was asked what he thought should be taught to children he replied, ‘What they should do when they are grown up.’
- When the Goths sacked Greece, what saved their libraries from being burned was the idea spread by one of the marauders that such goods should be left intact for their enemies: they had the property of deflecting them from military exercises while making them spend time on occupations which were sedentary and idle.
- 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 changes me. I have not, nor do I desire, enough authority to be believed. I feel too badly taught to teach others.
- Truth and reason are common to all: they no more belong to the man who first put them into words than to him who last did so.
- 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.74 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.75 Or if he is dumb he will do so by signs.
- It is as though our very touch bore infection: things which in themselves are good and beautiful are corrupted by our handling of them.
- in its excesses philosophy enslaves our native freedom and with untimely subtleties makes us stray from that beautiful and easy path that Nature has traced for us.
- I do not suffer from that common failing of judging another man1 [C] by me: I can easily believe that others have qualities quite distinct from my own. Just because I feel that I am pledged to my individual form, I do not bind all others to it as everyone else does: I can conceive and believe that there are thousands of different ways of living and, contrary to most men, I more readily acknowledge our differences than our similarities. I am as ready as you may wish to relieve another human being of my attributes and basic qualities and to contemplate him simply as he is, free from comparisons and sculpting him after his own model.
- 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.
- 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 is to say, let the rest be ours, but not so glued and joined to us that it cannot be pulled off without tearing away a piece of ourselves, skin and all. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to live to yourself.
- 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.]20 Socrates says that youth must get educated; grown men employ themselves in good actions; old men withdraw from affairs, both civil and military, living as they please without being bound to any definite duties.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The saying goes that a wise man lives not as long as he can but as long as he should, and that the greatest favour that Nature has bestowed on us, and the one which removes all grounds for lamenting over our human condition, is the one which gives us the key to the garden-gate; Nature has ordained only one entrance to life but a hundred thousand exits.
- Living is slavery if the freedom to die is wanting.
- Here you have not my teaching but my study: the lesson is not for others; it is for me. [C] Yet, for all that, you should not be ungrateful to me for publishing it. What helps me can perhaps help somebody else. Meanwhile I am not spoiling anything: I am only using what is mine.
- For many years now the target of my thoughts has been myself alone; I examine nothing, I study nothing, but me; and if I do study anything else, it is so as to apply it at once to myself, or more correctly, within myself. And it does not seem to me to be wrong if (as is done in other branches of learning, incomparably less useful) I share what I have learned in this one, even though I am hardly satisfied with the progress I have made. No description is more difficult than the describing of oneself; and none, certainly, is more useful. To be ready to appear in public you have to brush your hair; you have to arrange things and put them in order. I am therefore ceaselessly making myself ready since I am ceaselessly describing myself.
- My business, my art, is to live my life. If anyone forbids me to talk about it according to my own sense, experience and practice, let him also command an architect to talk about buildings not according to his own standard but his next-door neighbour’s, according to somebody else’s I knowledge not his own.
- Perhaps they mean that I should witness to myself by works and deeds not by the naked word alone. But I am chiefly portraying my ways of thinking, a shapeless subject which simply does not become manifest in deeds. I have to struggle to couch it in the flimsy medium of words.
- If anyone looks down on others and is drunk on self-knowledge let him turn his gaze upwards to ages past: he will pull his horns in then, discovering many thousands of minds which will trample him underfoot. If he embarks upon some flattering presumption of his own valour let him recall the lives of the two Scipios and all those armies and peoples who leave him so far behind. No one individual quality will make any man swell with pride who will, at the same time, take account of all those other weak and imperfect qualities which are in him and, finally, of the nullity of the human condition.
- For my part, 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.
- The cheating may escape my sight, but it does not escape my sight that I am very cheatable.
- Others may deceive me, but at least I do not deceive myself into thinking that I can protect myself against it; nor do I cudgel my brains for ways of making myself able to do so.
- Whenever I hear of the state that some other man is in, I waste no time over that but immediately turn my eyes on to myself to see how I am doing. Everything which touches him touches me too. What has happened to him is a warning and an alert coming from the same quarter. Every day, every hour, we say things about others which ought more properly to be addressed to ourselves if only we had learned to turn our thoughts inward as well as widely outward.
- The Law has thought it out better than we have, so it is better to let the Law make the wrong choice than rashly hazard doing so ourselves.
- 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.
- 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.
- it is at all events true that, of my own self, I am horrified by most of the vices. [C] (‘To unlearn evil’, the reply which Antisthenes made to the man who asked him what was the best way to be initiated, seems to centre on that idea.)15 I am, I repeat, horrified by them, [A] out of a native conviction so thoroughly my own that I have retained the impulses and character which I bore away with me when I was weaned; no other factors have made me worsen them – not even my own arguments which, since they have in some things broken ranks and left the common road, would readily license actions in me which my natural inclinations make me loathe. [B] I shall be saying something monstrous but I will say it all the same: I find, [C] because of this, in many cases [B] more rule and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my appetites less debauched than my reason.
- If a ray of God’s light touched us even slightly, it would be everywhere apparent: not only our words but our deeds would bear its lustre and its brightness. Everything emanating from us would be seen shining with that noble light. We ought to be ashamed: among the schools of human philosophy there never was an initiate who did not make his conduct and his life conform, at least in some respect, to their teachings, however difficult or strange: and yet so holy and heavenly an ordinance as ours only marks Christians on their tongues.
- Some people make the world believe that they hold beliefs they do not hold. A greater number make themselves believe it, having no idea what ‘believing’ really means, once you go deeply into the matter.
- It is evident to me that we only willingly carry out those religious duties which flatter our passions. Christians excel at hating enemies. Our zeal works wonders when it strengthens our tendency towards hatred, enmity, ambition, avarice, evil-speaking… and rebellion. On the other hand, zeal never makes anyone go flying towards goodness, kindness or temperance, unless he is miraculously pre-disposed to them by some rare complexion. Our religion was made to root out vices: now it cloaks them, nurses them, stimulates them.
- The souls of Emperors and of cobblers are cast in the same mould. We consider the importance of the actions of Princes and their weight and then persuade ourselves that they are produced by causes equally weighty, equally important. In that we deceive ourselves. They are tossed to and fro by the same principles as we are. The reasons that make us take issue with a neighbour lead Princes to start a war; the same reason which makes us flog a lackey makes kings lay waste a province. [B] They can do more but can wish as lightly. [A1] The same desires trouble a fleshworm and an elephant.
- Compare the life of a man, or enslaved by such fantasies with the life of a ploughman who, free from learning and prognostics, merely follows his natural appetites and judges things as they feel at present. He only feels ill when he really is ill; the other fellow often has stone in the mind before stone in the kidney. As though it were not time enough to suffer pain when it really comes along, our thoughts must run ahead and meet it.
- as Democritus says through the mouth of Cicero, ‘Quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat: coeli scrutantur plagas’ [Nobody examines what is before his feet: they scrutinize the tracts of the heavens].
- As Socrates says in Plato, you can make against anyone concerned with Philosophy exactly the same reproach as that woman made against Thales: he fails to see what lies before his feet. No philosopher understands his neighbour’s actions nor even his own; he does not even know what either of them is in himself, beast or Man.273
- We do not doubt much, because commonly received notions are assayed by nobody. We never try to find out whether the roots are sound. We argue about the branches. We do not ask whether any statement is true, but what it has been taken to mean. We ask whether Galen said this or said that: we never ask whether he said anything valid.
- Since Philosophy has been able to discover no good method leading to tranquillity which is common to all men, let each man seek his own one as an individual.
- Even if I did not follow the right road for its rightness, I would still follow it because I have found from experience that, at the end of the day, it is usually the happiest one and the most useful.
- Not being able to control events I control myself: if they will not adapt to me then I adapt to them.
- I turn round and round in myself. I owe chiefly to myself the capacity – [A1] such as it is in me [A] – for sifting the truth and my freeman’s humour for not easily enslaving my beliefs: for the firmest universal reasons that I have were, so to say, born in me. They are natural ones and entirely mine. I brought them forth crude and uncomplicated – products which are bold and strong but somewhat confused and imperfect. I subsequently confirmed and strengthened them by other men’s authority and by the sound reasonings of those Ancients with whom I found myself in agreement in judgements; they made my hold on them secure and gave me the full enjoyment of their possession.
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- Note: That’s how Montaigne got to where he was … but not the true and only path for getting there, just one possible path. Recounting those stepping stones may be helpful to the reader for inspiring him to walk his own path, which may or may not involve those stones, but they don’t prove the truth, only point to it. Put another way, piling up accounts of the stones I traversed doesn’t strengthen my argument, it shows that you can get there through a series of steps. The reader might take those steps or others, but the important thing is to start looking for a path and walking it.
- [B] Everyone seeks a reputation for a lively ready mind: I claim a reputation for steadiness; they seek a reputation for some conspicuous and signal activity or for individual talent: I claim one for the ordinate quality, the harmony and the tranquillity of my opinions and morals: [C] ‘Omnino, si quidquam est decorum, nihil est profecto magis quam æquabilitas universæ vitæ, tum singularum actionum: quam conservare non possis, si, aliorum naturam imitans, omittas tuam.’ [If anything at all is becoming, then nothing is more so than the even consistency of your entire life and of every one of its activities: and you cannot maintain that if you imitate other men’s natures and neglect your own.]
- ‘Youth should make provisions: Old Age should enjoy them,’ say the wise.3 And the greatest flaw which they find in our nature is that our desires are for ever renewing their youth. We are constantly beginning our lives all over again. Our zeal and our desire should sometimes smell of old age. We already have one foot in the grave yet our tastes and our pursuits are always just being born. [B] Tu secanda marmora Locas sub ipsum funus, et sepulchri Immemor, struis domos. [You go cutting marble and are about to die: yet you forget your own tomb and start building houses.]4 [C] The longest of my projects are for less than a year; I think only of bringing things to a close; I free myself from all fresh hopes and achievements; I say my last farewell to all the places I am leaving and daily rid myself of my belongings. ‘Olim jam nec perit quicquam mihi nec acquiritur… Plus superest viatici quam vice.’ [I have long since ceased to lose or gain: I have more rations than road left.]
- In short all the comfort I find in my old age is that it deadens within me many of the desires and worries which trouble our lives: worry about the way the world is going; worry about money, honours, erudition, health… and me.
- If study we must, let us study something suitable to our circumstances, so that we can make the same reply as that man who was asked what use were his studies in decrepit old age: ‘That I may better and more happily leave it behind,’ he said.
- How many have we seen patiently suffering to be roasted or burnt for opinions which, without understanding or knowledge, they have taken from others!
- We must not judge what is possible and impossible according to what seems credible or incredible to our own minds (as I have said elsewhere). It is nevertheless a major fault into which most people fall – [C] and I do not say that of Bodin – [A] to make difficulties about believing of another anything which they could not [C] or would not [A] do themselves.11 It seems to each man that the master Form of Nature is in himself, as a touchstone by which he may compare all the other forms. Activities which do not take his form as their model are feigned and artificial. What brute-like stupidity! I consider some men, particularly among the Ancients, to be way above me and even though I clearly realize that I am powerless to follow them on my feet I do not give up following them with my eyes and judging the principles which raise them thus aloft, principles the seeds of which I can just perceive in myself, as I also can that ultimate baseness in minds which no longer amazes me and which I do not refuse to believe in either. I can clearly see the spiral by which those great souls wind themselves higher. [A] I admire the greatness of those souls; those ecstasies which I find most beautiful I clasp unto me; though my powers do not reach as far, at least my judgement is most willingly applied to them.
- In them you will find the same mannerisms and attitudes which you have known in your commerce with him. Even if I could have adopted some style other than my usual one or some form better or more honourable I would not have done so; I want nothing from these writings except that they should recall me to your memory as sketched from nature. I want to take those very same characteristics and attributes which you, My Lady, have known, welcoming them with more honour and courtesy than they deserve, and lodge them (without change or alteration) within some solid body which is able to outlive me by a few years – or a few days – in which you will be able to find them again, refreshing your memory of them whenever you want to, without having the burden of otherwise keeping them in mind (they would not be worth that).
- A man may appear to the world as a marvel: yet his wife and his manservant see nothing remarkable about him. Few men have been wonders to their families.
- The soul’s value consists not in going high but in going ordinately. [C] Its greatness is not displayed in great things but in the Mean.
- My doings are ruled by what I am and are in harmony with how I was made. I cannot do better: and the act of repenting does not properly touch such things as are not within our power – that is touched by regretting. I can imagine countless natures more sublime and better ruled than my own: by doing that I do not emend my own capacities, any more than my arm or my intelligence become more strong because I can imagine others which are.
- I find that I proceeded wisely, according to my rule, in my previous deliberations given the state of the subject as set before me: and in the same circumstances I would do the same a thousand years from hence. I pay no regard to what it looks like now but to how it was when I was examining it.
- In the subjects which we handle, and especially in the natures of men, there are hidden parts which cannot be divined, silent characteristics which are never revealed and which are sometimes unknown even to the one who has them but which are awakened and brought out by subsequent events. If my wisdom was unable to penetrate through to them and foresee them I bear it no grudge: there are limits to its obligations. What defeats me is the outcome, and [B] if it favours the side I rejected, that cannot be helped. I do not find fault with myself: I blame not what I did but my fortune. And that is not to be called repenting.
- I set little store by my own opinions but just as little by other people’s. And Fortune has treated me worthily. I receive little counsel: I give even less. I am very rarely asked for it: I am even less believed, and I know of no public or private undertaking which has been set right or halted on my advice. Even such persons as chance to be somewhat dependent on my advice have readily allowed themselves to be swayed by some completely different mind. Since I am just as jealous of my right to peace and quiet as of my right to authority, I prefer it that way. By leaving me out they are acting on my own principles, which consist in being settled and contained entirely within myself: it is a joy for me to be detached from others’ affairs and relieved of protecting them.
- When I look upon such powerful means of expression, so dense and full of life, I do not conclude that it is said well but thought well. It is the audacity of the conception which fills the words and makes them soar: [C] ‘Pectus est quod dissertum facit.’ [It is the mind which makes for good style.]101 [B] Nowadays when men say judgement they mean style, and rich concepts are but beautiful words.
- Descriptions such as these are not produced by skilful hands but by having the subject vividly stamped upon the soul. Gallus writes straightforwardly because his concepts are straightforward. Horace is not satisfied with some superficial vividness; that would betray his sense; he sees further and more clearly into his subject: to describe itself his mind goes fishing and ferreting through the whole treasure-house of words and figures of speech; as his concepts surpass the ordinary, it is not ordinary words that he needs. Plutarch said that he could see what Latin words meant from the things which they signified.102 The same applies here: the sense discovers and begets the words, which cease to be breath but flesh and blood. [C] They signify more than they say. [B] Even the weaker brethren have some notion of this: when I was in in Italy I could express whatever I wanted to say in everyday conversation, but for serious purposes I would not have dared to entrust myself to a language which I could neither mould nor turn on my lathe beyond the common idiom. I want to add something of my own.
- In our own language there is plenty of cloth but a little want of tailoring. There is no limit to what could be done with the help of our hunting and military idioms, which form a fruitful field for borrowing; locutions are like seedlings: transplanting makes them better and stronger.
- ‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘but I correct only careless errors not customary ones. Do I not always talk like that? Am I not portraying myself to the life? If so, that suffices! I have achieved what I wanted to: everyone recognizes me in my book and my book in me.’
- All topics are equally productive to me. I could write about a fly! (God grant that the topic I now have in hand be not chosen at the behest of a will which is as light as a fly’s.) I may begin with any subject I please, since all subjects are linked to each other.
- moreover I most often journey without the proper company for sustained conversation, which enables me to be free to think my own thoughts. What happens is like what happens to my dreams: during them I commend them to my memory (for I often dream I am dreaming); next morning I can recall their colouring as it was – whether they were playful or sad or weird – but as for all the rest, the more I struggle to find it the more I bury it in forgetfulness. It is the same with those chance reflections which happen to drop into my mind: all that remains of them in my memory is a vague idea, just enough to make me gnaw irritably away, uselessly seeking for them.
- It is all too easy to stamp ideas of generosity on a man who has the means of fulfilling them with other people’s money.
- There may be others of my complexion who learn better by counter-example than by example, by eschewing not pursuing. That was the sort of instruction which the Elder Cato was thinking of when he said that the wise have more to learn from the fools than the fools from the wise;4 as also that lyre-player in antiquity who, Pausanias says, used to require his students to go and listen to some performer who lived across the street so that they would learn to loathe discords and faulty rhythms.5 My horror of cruelty thrusts me deeper into clemency than any example of clemency ever could draw me. A good equerry does not make me sit up straight in the saddle as much as the sight of a lawyer or a Venetian out riding, and a bad use of language corrects my own better than a good one. Every day I am warned and counselled by the stupid deportment of someone. What hits you affects you and wakes you up more than what pleases you. We can only improve ourselves in times such as these by walking backwards, by discord not by harmony, by being different not by being like. Having myself learned little from good examples I use the bad ones, the text of which is routine. [C] I strove to be as agreeable as others were seen to be boring; as firm as others were flabby; as gentle as others were sharp. But I was setting myself unattainable standards.
- Just as our mind is strengthened by contact with vigorous and well-ordered minds, so too it is impossible to overstate how much it loses and deteriorates by the continuous commerce and contact we have with mean and ailing ones. No infection is as contagious as that is. I know by experience what that costs by the ell. I love arguing and discussing, but with only a few men and for my own sake: for to serve as a spectacle to the great and indulge in a parade of your wits and your verbiage is, I consider, an unbecoming trade for an honourable gentleman.
- What I mean is that when our judgement brings a charge against another man over a matter then in question, it must not exempt us from an internal judicial inquiry. It is a work of charity for a man who is unable to weed out a defect in himself to try, nevertheless, to weed it out in another in whom the seedling may be less malignant and stubborn. And it never seems to me to be an appropriate answer to anyone who warns me of a fault in me to say that he has it too. What difference does that make? The warning remains true and useful. If we had sound nostrils our shit ought to stink all the more for its being our own.
- Siramnes the Persian replied to those who were amazed that his enterprises turned out so badly, seeing that his projects were so wise, by saying that he alone was master of his projects while Fortune was mistress of the outcome of his enterprises: they too could make the same reply to explain the opposite tendency.32 Most of this world’s events happen by themselves: Fata viam inveniunt. [The Fates find a way.]33
- My thought sketches out the matter for a while and dwells lightly on the first aspects of it: then I usually leave the principal thrust of the task to heaven.
- You cannot cure silliness and unreasonableness by one act of warning. [C] Of that sort of cure we can properly say what Cyrus replied to the man who urged him to give an exhortation to his troops at the moment of battle: that men are not made courageous warriors on the battlefield by a good harangue any more than you can become a good musician by hearing a good song.43 Apprenticeships must be served, before you set hand to anything, by long and sustained study.
- I cannot give an account of my life by my actions: Fortune has placed them too low for that; so I do so by my thoughts.
- in an age when so many behave wickedly it is almost praiseworthy merely to be useless.
- Those who go to the other extreme, who are happy with themselves, who esteem above all else whatever they possess and who recognize no form more beautiful than the one they behold, may not be wise as we are but they are truly happier. I do not envy them their wisdom but I do envy them their good fortune.
- ‘If the worst comes to worst, forestall poverty by cutting down expenses.’ That is what I try to do, changing my ways before poverty compels me to. Meanwhile I have established enough gradations in my soul to allow me to do with less than I have – and I mean contentedly.
- When asked what kind of wine he thought best, Diogenes replied, ‘Someone else’s’.19 I agree with that.
- I am content to enjoy the world without being over-occupied with it and to lead a life which is no more than excusable, neither a burden to myself nor to others.
- Princes [C] give me plenty if they take nothing from me and [B] do me enough good if they do me no harm. That is all I ask of them.
- In addition to such reasons, travel seems to me to be an enriching experience. It keeps our souls constantly exercised by confronting them with things new and unknown; and (as I have often said) I know of no better school for forming our life than ceaselessly to set before it the variety found in so many other lives, [C] concepts and customs, [B] and to give it a taste of the perpetual diversity of the forms of human nature.
- ‘Sic est faciendum ut contra naturam universam nihil coritendamus; ea tamen conservata, propriam sequamur.’ [We must so live as not to struggle against Nature in general; having safeguarded such things, we should follow our own nature.]
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- Note: Shalom
- What is the use of those high philosophical peaks on which no human being can settle and those rules which exceed our practice and our power? I am well aware that people often expound to us ideas about life which neither the speaker nor the hearers have any hope of following or (what is more) any desire. The judge filches a bit of the very same paper on which he has just written the sentence on an adulterer in order to send a billet-doux to the wife of a colleague. [C] The woman you have just been having an illicit tumble with will soon, in your very presence, be screaming harsher condemnations of a similar fault in a friend of hers than Portia would. [B] Some condemn people to death for crimes which they do not actually believe to be even mistakes. When I was a youth I saw a fine gentleman offering to the public, with one hand, poetry excelling in beauty and eroticism both, and with the other, at the same instant, the most cantankerous reformation of theology that the world has had for breakfast for many a long year.
- ‘I know nothing of their books,’ said Laïs the courtesan, ‘nor of their wisdom and philosophy, but those fellows come knocking at my door as often as anyone.’128 Since our licence always takes us beyond what is lawful and permissible, we have often made the precepts and laws for our lives stricter than universal reason requires.
- When Arcesilaus was visiting the [C] ailing Ctesibius,150 [B] he realized that he was badly off, so he gave him money, slipping it under his pillow. By concealing it from him he was also giving him a quittance from a debt of gratitude.
- In my opinion we must lend ourselves to others but give ourselves to ourselves alone.
- If I am occasionally pressed into taking in hand some business foreign to me, then it is in hand that I promise to take it, not in lung nor in liver! I accept the burdens but I refuse to make them parts of my body. Take trouble over them: yes; get worked up about them: never. I look after them, but not like a broody hen. I have enough to do to order and arrange those pressing affairs of my own which lie within my veins and vitals without having a jostling crowd of other folk’s affairs lodged there and trampling all over me; I have enough to do to attend to matters which by nature belong to my own being without inviting in outsiders. Those who realize what they owe to themselves, and the great duties which bind themselves to themselves, discover that Nature has made that an ample enough charge and by no means a sinecure. Do not go far away: you have plenty to do ‘at home!’3 Men put themselves up for hire. Their talents are not for themselves but for those to whom they have enslaved themselves. They are never ‘at home’: their tenants are there! That widespread attitude does not please me. We should husband our soul’s freedom, never pawning it, save on occasions when it is proper to do so – which, if we judge soundly, are very few.
- Note: Metaphor, first body then lodgings
- Just watch people who have been conditioned to let themselves be enraptured and carried away: they do it all the time, in small matters as in great, over things which touch them and those which touch them not at all. They become involved, indiscriminately, wherever there is a task [C] and obligations; [B] they are not alive without bustle and bother. [C] ‘in negotiis sunt negotii causa’. [They are busy so as to be busy.]4 The only reason why they seek occupations is to be occupied. It is not a case of wanting to move but of being unable to hold still, just as a rock shaken loose cannot arrest its fall until it lies on the bottom. For a certain type of man, being busy is a mark of competence and dignity. [B] Their minds seek repose in motion, like babes in a cradle. They can say that they are as useful to their friends as they are bothersome to themselves. Nobody gives his money away to others: everyone gives his time. We are never more profligate than with the very things over which avarice would be useful and laudable.
- I would similarly regret any new inward attainment. It is almost better never to become a good man at all than to do so tardily, understanding how to live when you have no life ahead. I am on the way out: I would readily leave to one who comes later whatever wisdom I am learning about dealing with the world. I do not want even a good thing when it is too late to use it. Mustard after dinner! What use is knowledge to a man with no brain left? It is an insult and disfavour of Fortune to offer us presents which fill us with just indignation because they were lacking to us in due season. Take me no farther; I can go on no more. Of all the qualities which sufficiency possesses, endurance alone suffices. Try giving the capabilities of an outstanding treble to a chorister whose lungs are diseased, or [B] eloquence to a hermit banished to the deserts of Arabia! No art is required to decline. [C] At the finish of every task the ending makes itself known. My world is over: my mould has been emptied; I belong entirely to the past; I am bound to acknowledge that and to conform my exit to it.
- If a man cannot attain to that noble Stoic impassibility, let him hide in the lap of this peasant insensitivity of mine. What Stoics did from virtue I teach myself to do from temperament. Storms lodge in the middle regions; philosophers and country bumpkins – the two extremes – meet in peace of mind and happiness.
- The infancies of all things are feeble and weak. We must keep our eyes open at their beginnings; you cannot find the danger then because it is so small: once it has grown, you cannot find the cure. While chasing ambition I would have had to face, every day, thousands of irritations harder to digest than the difficulty I had in putting a stop to my natural inclination towards it.
- I realize that if you ask people to account for ‘facts’, they usually spend more time finding reasons for them than finding out whether they are true. They ignore the whats and expatiate on the whys.
- To know causes belongs only to Him who governs things, not to us who are patients of such things and who, without penetrating their origin or essences, have complete enjoyment of them in terms of our own nature. Wine is no more delightful to the man who knows its primary qualities. Quite the reverse: by bringing in pretensions to knowledge the body infringes, and the soul encroaches upon, the rights which both of them have to enjoy the things of this world. To define, to know and to allow belong to professors and schoolmasters: to enjoy and to accept belong to inferiors, subordinates and apprentices.
- Many of this world’s abuses are engendered – [C] or to put it more rashly, all of this world’s abuses are engendered – [B] by our being schooled to fear to admit our ignorance [C] and because we are required to accept anything which we cannot refute. [B] Everything is proclaimed by injunction and assertion.
- Moreover our own faculties are not trained that way. We neither assay them nor understand them: we clothe ourselves in those of others and allow our own to lie unused – and some may say that about me, asserting that I have merely gathered here a big bunch of other men’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the string to hold them together. I have indeed made a concession to the taste of the public with these borrowed ornaments which accompany me. But I do not intend them to cover me up or to hide me: that is the very reverse of my design: I want to display nothing but my own – what is mine by nature. If I had had confidence to do what I really wanted, I would have spoken utterly alone, come what may. [C] Yet despite my projected design and my original concept (but following the whim of the age and the exhortation of others) I burden myself with more and more of them every day. That may not become me well: I think it does not, but never mind: it might be useful to somebody else.
- Any instruction which convinces people that religious belief alone, without morality, suffices to satisfy God’s justice is destructive of all government and is far more harmful than it is ingenious and subtle. Men’s practices reveal an extraordinary distinction between devotion and the sense of right and wrong.
- Scientific investigations and inquiries serve merely to feed our curiosity. They have nothing to do with knowledge so sublime: the philosophers are very right to refer us to the laws of Nature, but they pervert them and present Nature’s face too sophistically, painted in colours which are far too exalted, from which arise so many diverse portraits of so uniform a subject. As Nature has furnished us with feet to walk with, so has she furnished us with wisdom to guide us in our lives. That wisdom is not as clever, strong and formal as the one which they have invented, but it is becomingly easy and beneficial; in the case of the man who is lucky enough to know how to use it simply and ordinately (that is, naturally) it does – very well – what the other says it will. The more simply we entrust ourself to Nature the more wisely we do so. Oh what a soft and delightful pillow, and what a sane one on which to rest a well-schooled head, are ignorance and unconcern. [B] I would rather be an expert on me than on [C] Cicero.
- I regard neither a class of error nor an example of it as one stone which has made me stumble: I learn to distrust my trot in general and set about improving it. [C] To learn that we have said or done a stupid thing is nothing: we must learn a more ample and important lesson: that we are but blockheads.
- What great fools we are! ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I haven’t done a thing today.’ – ‘Why! Have you not lived? That is not only the most basic of your employments, it is the most glorious.’ – ‘I would have shown them what I can do, if they had set me to manage some great affair.’ – If you have been able to examine and manage your own life you have achieved the greatest task of all. Nature, to display and show her powers, needs no great destiny: she reveals herself equally at any level of life, both behind curtains or without them. Our duty is to bring order to our morals not to the materials for a book: not to win provinces in battle but order and tranquillity for the conduct of our life. Our most great and glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly. Everything else – reigning, building, laying up treasure – are at most tiny props and small accessories.