Michel de Montaigne - Death Quotes

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I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden.

Michel de Montaigne
If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said.

Michel de Montaigne
There is nothing of evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.

Michel de Montaigne
God is favorable to those whom he makes to die by degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age. The last death will be so much the less painful: it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most.

Michel de Montaigne
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learnt to die has forgot to serve.

Michel de Montaigne
Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.

Michel de Montaigne
We hold death, poverty, and grief for our principal enemies; but this death, which some repute the most dreadful of all dreadful things, who does not know that others call it the only secure harbor from the storm and tempests of life, the sovereign good of nature, the sole support of liberty, and the common and sudden remedy of all evils?

Michel de Montaigne
If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live.

Michel de Montaigne
A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, and suchlike accidents; but as to death, we can experience it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it

Michel de Montaigne
I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but caring little for it, and even less about the imperfections of my garden.

Michel de Montaigne
To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere." "To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

Michel de Montaigne
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, [...] "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

Michel de Montaigne
All of the days go toward death and the last one arrives there.

Michel de Montaigne
The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

Michel de Montaigne
The day of your birth leads you to death as well as to life.

Michel de Montaigne
All our days travel toward death: the last one reaches it.

Michel de Montaigne
The perpetual work of your life is but to lay the foundation of death.

Michel de Montaigne