1.1 Death

We are born for action: When I die, may I be in the midst of my work. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.27)

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1.2 On how to live a proactive life

What is us of providing yourself with pain 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 harbor. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.130)

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1.3 Even a base soul can attain the calm virtue from Socrates

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 the calm virtue which Socrates could sustain throughout his adult life. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.XiV)

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1.4 Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still upon our asses.

Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still upon our asses. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.xxi)
A fine thing to get up on stilts: for even on stilts we must ever walk with our legs! And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our asses. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.426)

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1.5 Plato and I see and understand the same way

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. Plato and I see and understand the same way. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P. 44)

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1.6 We are never the same person

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. [Let me convince you that it is a hard task to be always the same man. ] (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.131)

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1.7 Appreciate your memories 

[To be able to enjoy your former life again is to live twice.] (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.262)

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1.8 Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud.

We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of discords as well as of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life. Without such blending, our being can be: one category is no less necessary than the other. To assay kicking against natural necessity is to reproduce the mad deed of Ctesiphon who, to a kicking match, challenged his mule. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.394)

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1.9 Our most great and glorious achievement is to live our life fittingly

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. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.415)

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1.10 On beliefs

A belief is like an impression stamped on our soul: the softer and less resisting the soul, the easier it is to print anything on it:[For just as a weight placed on a balance must weight it down, so the mind must yield to clear evidence.]. 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. That is why children, the common people, women, and the sick are more readily led by the nose. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.74)

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1.11 The human side

Those humor soaring to transcendence terrify me as do great unapproachable heights, and for me, nothing in the life of Socrates is so awkward to digest as his ecstasies and his demonizes, and nothing about Plato so human as what is alleged for calling him divine. [B] And of [C] our [B] disciplines it is those which ascend the highest which, it seems to me, are the most [C] base and [B] earthbound. I can find nothing so [C] abject [B] and so mortal in the life of Alexander as his fantasies about [C] his immobilization. [B] Philotas, in a retort, he made in a letter, showed his mordant wit when congratulating Alexander on his being placed among the gods by the oracle of Jupiter Ammon: ‘As far as you are concerned I’m delighted,’ he said, ‘but there is reason to pity those men who will have to live with a man, and obey a man, who [C] trespasses beyond, and cannot be content with, [B] the measure of a man’:
[Because you hold yourself lower than the gods, you hold imperial sway.]
(Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.425)

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1.12 The pleasure of uncertainty

The understanding of lanaguage

Only fools have made up their minds and are certain: For doubting pleases me as much as knowing. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.44)

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1.13 How he lives day by day

The brush-strokes of my portrait do not go away even though they do change and vary. The world is but a perennial see-saw. Everything in it - the land, the mountains of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt - all waver with a common motion and their own. Constancy itself is nothing but a more languid rocking to and fro. I am unable to stabilize my subject: it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness. I grasp it as it is now, at this moment when I am lingering over it. I am not portraying being but becoming: not the passage from one age to another (or, as the folk put it, from one seven-year period to the next) but from day to day, from minute to minute. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.232)

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1.14 Diversity is the essence of humans

They hold to other notions or parties that, on the contrary, just as the most general style followed by Nature is variety - [C] even more in minds than in bodies, since minds are of a more malleable substance capable of accepting more forms - [ A ] I find it much rarer to see our humours and [C] purposes [A] coincide. In the whole world, there have never been two identical opinions any more than two identical [C] hairs or seeds. [A] Their most universal characteristic is diversity. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.231)

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1.15 We are but blockheads

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. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.376)

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1.16 The difficulty to educate children

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. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.41)

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1.17 The qualities a kid must have

As for our pupil’s talk, let his virtue and his sense of right and wrong shine through it and have no guide but reason. 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; 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. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.48)

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1.18 The will

He should be able to do anything but want to do only what is good. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.61)
[There is a great difference between not wanting to do evil and not knowing how to. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.61)

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1.19 First you master then you talk

The Athenians had to choose between two architects to take charge of a large building project. The first one was the more fly and presented himself with a fine prepared speech about the job to be done; he won the favour of the common people. The other architect merely spoke two or three words: “Gentlemen of Athens: what he said, I will do.’ (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.65)

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1.20 On how age can affect us. Puts more wrinkles in the mind than in the face

What we call wisdom is the moroseness of our humour and our distaste for things as they are now. But in truth, we do not so much give up our vices as change them - for the worse , if you ask me. Apart from silly tottering pride, boring babble, prickly unsociable humour, superstition and a ridiculous concern for wealth when we have lost the use of it, I find that there are more envy and unfairness and malice; age sets more wrinkles on our minds than on our faces. You can find no souls - or very few - which as they grow old do not stink of rankness and of rot. It is the man as a whole that marches towards his flower and his fading. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.246)

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1.21 On death

There is no place where death cannot find us - even if we constantly twist our heads about in all directions as in a suspect land: ‘Quae quasi saxum Tantalo sempre impendent.’ [It is like the rock forever hanging over the head of Tantalus.] Our assizes often send prisoners to be executed at the scene of their crimes. On the way there, take them past fair mansions and ply them with good cheer as much as you like. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.20)

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1.22 The length of life

Aristotle says that there are tiny creatures on the river 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. 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. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.30)

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1.23 Sleep

Alexander said that he acknowledged he was a mortal because of sleep and his activity: sleep stifles and suppresses the faculties of our souls; the 1ob’ similarly devours and disperses them. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.305)

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1.24 Virtue is achieved by control and no effort

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. Socrates, the foremost of her darlings, deliberately renounced effort so as to glide along with her easy natural progress. She is a Mother who nurtures human pleasures: by making them just she makes them sure and pure; by making them moderate they never pant for breath or lose their savour; by cutting away those which she denies us she sharpens our appreciation of those she leaves us. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.56)

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1.25 The hardest virtue is in everyday actions

Rare is the life that remains ordinate even in privacy. Anyone can take part in a farce and act the honest man on the trestles: but to be right-ruled within, in your bosom, where anything is licit, where everything is hidden - that’s what matters. The nearest to that is to be so in your home, in your everyday actions for which you are accountable to nobody; there is no striving there, no artifice. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.236)

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1.26 Truth is no wiser for being ancient

What shall we do with those people who will receive only printed testimony, who will not believe anyone who is not in a book, nor truth unless it is properly aged? [C] We set our stupidities in dignity when we set them in print. [B] For these people there is far more weight in saying, ‘I have read that ... ‘ than if you say, ‘I have heard tell that . . . ‘ But I (who have the same distrust of a man’s pen as his tongue; who know that folk writes with as little discretion as they talk and who esteem this age as much as any other former one) as willingly cite a friend of mine as Aulus Gellius or Macrobius, and what I have seen as what they have written. [C] And just as it is held that duration does not heighten virtue, I similarly reckon that truth is no wiser for being more ancient. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.384)

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1.27 Joy with the acceptance of a stoic

I want to show myself to have been uniform and to be seen as such. If I had to live again, I would live as I have done; I neither regret the past nor fear the future. And unless I deceive myself, things within have gone much the same as those without. One of my greatest obligations to my lot is that the course of my physical state has ·brought each thing in due season. I have known the blade, the blossom and the fruit; and I now know their witheringly. Happily so, since naturally so. I can bear more patiently the ills that I have since they come in due season, and since they also make me recall with more gratitude the long-lasting happiness of my former life. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.245)

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1.28 On the right way to feel pleasure

Is there some pleasure that thrills me? I do not allow it to be purloined by my senses: I associate my Soul with it, not so that she will [C] bind herself to it172 [B] but take joy in it: not losing herself but finding herself in it; her role is to observe herself as mirrored in that happy state, to weigh that happiness, gauge it and increase it. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.420)

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1.29 In lonely places be a crowd inside yourself.

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 private that no commerce or communication with the outside world should find a place where 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. [In lonely places, be a crowd unto yourself]. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.100)

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1.30 Love is knowing how to seize an opportunity.

Oh , what a mad advantage lies in the opportune moment! If anyone were to ask me what is the first quality needed in love I would reply knowing how to seize an opportunity. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.291)

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1.31 The cure of ignorance

Anyone who wishes to be cured of ignorance must first admit to it: [ C] Iris is the daughter of Thaumantis: amazement is the foundation of all philosophy; inquiry, its way of advancing; and ignorance is its end. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.356)

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1.32 There are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other.

It is more of a business to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the texts, and there are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other. [C] All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth. Is not learning to understand the learned the chief and most celebrated thing that we learn nowadays! Is that not the common goal, the ultimate goal, of all our studies? (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.369)

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1.33 There is no true merit

Our opinions graft themselves on to each other. The first serves as stock for the second, the second for a third. And so we climb up, step by step. It thus transpires that the one who has climbed highest often has more honour than he deserves, since he has only climbed one speck higher on the shoulders of his predecessor. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.369)

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1.34 The famous Architect 

The Athenians had to choose between two architects to take charge of a large building project. The first one was the more fly and presented himself with a fine prepared speech about the job to be done; he won the favour of the common people. The other architect merely spoke two or three words: “Gentlemen of Athens: what he said, I will do.’ (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.65)

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1.35 What indigenous people thought from civilization at that time 

The King had a long interview with them (Indians): they were shown manners, out 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 their doors, emaciated with poverty and hunger: they found it odd that destitute halves should put up with such injustice and did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.91)

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1.36 On Alexander age 

The man who had power to decide everything in the whole world at nineteen wanted a man to be thirty before he could decide where to place a gutter. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.121)

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1.37 On Labineus

In Rome there was a figure of great bravery and dignity called Labienus; among other qualities he excelled in every kind of literature; he was, I think, the son of that great Labienus who was the foremost among captains who served under Caesar in the Gallic Wars, subsequently threw in his lot with Pompey the Great and fought for him most bravely until Caesar defeated him in Spain. There were several people who were jealous of the Labienus I am referring to; he also probably had enemies among the courtiers and favourites of the contemporary Emperors for his frankness and for inheriting his father’s innate hostility towards tyranny, which we may believe coloured his books and writing. His enemies prosecuted him before the Roman magistrates and obtained a conviction, requiring several of the books he had published to be burnt. This was the very first case of the death-penalty being inflicted on books and erudition; it was subsequently applied at Rome in several other cases. We did not have means nor matter enough for our cruelty unless we also let it concern itself with things which Nature has exempted from any sense of pain, such as our renown and the products of our minds, and unless we inflicted physical suffering on the teaching and the documents of the Muses. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.166)

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1.38 A example of courage and endurance

Epicharis, having glutted and exhausted the cruelty of Nero’s attendants and withstood for one full day their burning brands, their beatings and their instruments of torture without revealing a word of her conspiracy, was brought back to the rack the next day with her limbs all shattered: she slipped the cord from her dress through the arm of a chair, made a running knot, thrust her head through it and hanged herself by the weight of her body. Having as she did the courage to die thus after having endured those first tortures, does she not appear to have deliberately lent herself to that trial of her endurance in order to mock that tyrant and to encourage others to make a plot against him similar to her own? (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.189)

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1.39 The king of Peru

The last two kings whom the Spaniards hounded were kings over many kings, the most powerful kings in that new world and perhaps also in our own.
The first was the King of Peru. He was captured in battle and put to so huge a ransom that it defies all belief; he paid it faithfully and showed by his dealings that he was of a frank, noble and steadfast heart, a man of honest and tranquil mind. The Conquistadores, having already extracted gold weighing one million three hundred and twenty-five thousand five hundred ounces (not counting silver and other booty amounting to no less, so that afterwards they even used solid gold to shoe their horses), were seized with the desire to discover what remained of the treasures of that king, no matter what it cost them in bad faith, [C] and to make free with whatever he had kept back. [B] They fabricated false evidence, accusing him of planning to get his territories to rise up in revolt and to set him free. Whereupon - a beautiful sentence, delivered by those who had got up this act of treachery! - he was condemned to be publicly hanged until he was dead, having first been compelled to buy off the agony of being burned alive at the stake by accepting baptism - which was administered to him while he was being tortured. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.346)

But since nothing of value could be extorted from them, their hears being stronger than the tortures, the Spaniards finally fell into such a fit of madness that, contrary to their word and to the law of nations, they sentenced the King and one of the chief lords of his court to be tortured in each other’s sight. That lord, overcome with pain, surrounded by blazing braziers, finally turned his gaze piteously towards his sovereign, as if to beg [C] forgiveness because he could stand it no longer. [B] That King32 proudly and severely fixed his eyes on him to reproach him for his cowardice and faint-heartedness and simply said these words in a firm hoarse voice: ‘What about me? Am I having a bath? Am I any more at ease than you are?’ Straightforward afterwards that lord succumbed to the pain and died where he was. The King was borne away, half-roasted, not so much out of pity (for what pity could ever touch the souls of men who, for dubious information about some golden vessel or other that they would pillage, would grill a man before their very eyes, not to mention a King of so great a destiny and merit) but because his constancy rendered their cruelty more and more humiliating. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.347)
 
The peoples of the Kingdom of Mexico were somewhat more urban and more cultured than the other peoples over there. In addition, like us, they judged that the world was nearing its end, taking as a portent of this the desolation that we visited upon them. They believed that the world’s existence was divided into five periods, each as long as the life of five successive suns. Four suns had already done their time, the one shining on them now being the fifth. The first sun perished with all other creatures in a universal Flood; the second, by the sky falling on mankind and choking every living thing (to which age they ascribed giant men, showing the Spaniards bones of men of such proportion that they must have stood twenty spans high); the third, by a fire which engulfed and burnt everything; the fourth, by a rush of air and wind which flattened everything including several mountains; human beings were not killed by it but changed into baboons (what impressions cannot be stamped on the receptive credulity of men!). After the death of that fourth sun the world was in perpetual darkness for twenty-five years, during the fifteenth of which was created a man and a woman who remade the human race. Ten years later, on a particular day which they observe, the sun appeared, newly created; they count their years from that day. On the third day after it was created their old gods died; new gods were subsequently born from time to time. My authority could learn nothing about how they believed this fifth sun will die. But their dating of that fourth change tallies with that great conjunction of the planets which (eight hundred years ago, according to the reckoning of our astrologers) produced many great changes and innovations in the world. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.349)

Instead of using coaches or vehicles of any kind they have themselves carried on the shoulders of men. The day he was captured, that last King of Peru was in the midst of his army, borne seated on a golden chair suspended from shafts of gold. The Spaniards in their attempts to topple him (as they wanted to take him alive) killed many of his bearers, but many more vied to take the places of the dead , so that , no matter how many they slaughtered, they could not bring him down until a mounted soldier dashed in, grabbed hold of him and yanked him to the ground. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.350)

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1.40 Priest who changed sexes

We realize that women have an incomparably greater capacity for the act of love than we do and desire it more ardently - and we know that this fact was attested in Antiquity by that priest who had been first a man and then a woman:

Venus huic erat utraque nota.

[He knew Venus from both angles.]*

* 38, Tiresias, who changed sex a frequently cited example : cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 323; then, Juvenal, Satires , VI, 128-9; the Emperor was Proculus, t_he Empress, Messalina, the consort of Claudius. (Cf. Tiraquellus, De legibus com,ubialibus, IX, 94 for Messalina, and XV, 92 for Proculus.)

(Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.277)

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1.41 How you swear

When I swear my own way it is always ‘By God’ - which is the most direct of all

the oaths. They say that Socrates used to swear ‘By dog’; Zeno ‘By goats’ (the same exclamation used today by the Italians, Cappan); Pythagoras, ‘By air and by water’. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.303)

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1.42 Year shorten

In France, some two or three year ago now, they shortened the year by ten days. (Michel De Montaigne: The Essays - A Selection (Penguin) P.351)