Michel de Montaigne on Life

"The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave."

"Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream."

"We were halves throughout, and to that degree that methinks by outliving him I defraud him of his part."

"There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."

"Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet— the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies."

"Even opinion is of force enough to make itself to be espoused at the expense of life."

"How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!"

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened."

"The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death."

"The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life."

"If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it."

"The Montaigne Studies Journal at the University of Chicago"

"He who would teach men to die would teach them to live."

"Writing does not cause misery. It is born of misery."

"How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among the friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out."

"He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents."

"God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand"