It is true: Montaigne achieved little else in his life aside from posing the question: “How should I live?
I had no witness against me left but my own memory.“...
War does not permit itself to be coordinated with reason and righteousness. It needs stimulated emotions, enthusiasm for its own cause and hatred for the adversary.
This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel’s disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel.
Poverty was crushing all the feeling they had. It was intolerable to be together this way, and yet they tolerated it.
See, that’s what we’re like. You’re brave and you’re not afraid to die, but you’re afraid of being late for work. That’s how enslaved we are, that’s how ingrained it is.
Has this new dress, this new world made me so different? Or was this inside me all along, and I was just too fainthearted, too timid? That’s what Mother always said. Maybe everything’s not so hard, maybe life is so much easier than I thought, you just need courage, you just need to have a sense of yourself, then you’ll discover your hidden resources.
But you wouldn’t believe what a dead finger does to a living hand.
The woman has a dangerous decision to confront, whether she will live her own life, or that of her children, whether she will be a woman first or a mother first.
The most just death is that which is most willed. Our lives depend on the will of others, but death on ourselves alone. There is nothing to which we should apply ourselves more than this. Reputation has no place here and it is folly to think of it. Life is servitude if we lack the freedom to die.
Death is a certain refuge, never to be feared”; “Strong diseases require strong remedies”, writes Montaigne.
It is my opinion that you should lend yourself to others and give yourself only to yourself.
He felt that it was a mistake to look for signs and portents instead of waiting until they were revealed to him in their own good time.
Nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void.
It’s no use torturing oneself; it only tortures other people.
Gratitude is a rare frame of mind; and those who are grateful can seldom find a way to express what they feel. They are overwhelmed by silence; are shamefaced; and, sometimes, actually try to hide their feelings.
That’s it. Evasion is key.
There is nothing on earth like the love of a child that passes unnoticed in the dark because she has no hope: her love is submissive, so much a servant’s love, passionate and lying in wait, in a way that the avid yet unconsciously demanding love of a grown woman can never be.
And I said to myself: from now on, help anyone and everyone so far as in you lies. Cease to be apathetic, indifferent! Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone’s destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity. And my heart, astonished at its own workings, quivered with gratitude towards the sick girl whom I had unwittingly hurt and who, through her suffering, had taught me the creative magic of pity.
And the strength of love is always misjudged if we evaluate it only by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart’s history. A great, unused capacity for emotion had been lying in wait, and now it raced with outstretched arms towards the first person who seemed to deserve it.
Personally I take more satisfaction in understanding people than in passing judgement on them.