Two of the most interesting essays of Montaigne are his essays on Death and Education (though others recommend themselves, perhaps most of all his essays on friendship, written shortly after he lost his best friend, and on solitude). I thought I’d share a few insights. (A broader discussion can be found here)

On Death

“We are all bound one voyage; the lot of all, sooner or later, is to come out of the urn. All must to eternal exile sail away.”

Referring to death; “And to begin to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, ‘Well, and what if it had been death itself?'”

“The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.”

“Why should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented?”

“Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you”

“Why dos thou fear thy last day? It contributes no more to thy dissolution, than every one of the rest; the last step is not the cause of lassitude: it does not confess it. Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it.”

On Education

“[I]n truth, all I understand as to that particular is only this, that the greatest and most important difficulty of human science is the education of children.”

“We only labour to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.”

Better a “well-made than a well-filled head…to prefer manners and judgment to mere learning”

“Let my governor [teacher] remember to what end his instructions are principally directed, and that he do not so much imprint in his pupil’s memory the date of the ruin of Carthage, as the manners of Hannibal and Scipio; nor so much where Marcellus died, as why it was unworthy of his duty that he died there.”

“Let him be able to do everything, but love to do nothing but what is good.”

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