The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Montaigne
• Preface
• The Author to the Reader
• Essays of Montaigne
• By Different Methods Men Arrive At the Same End.
• Of Sorrow
• Our Affections Carry Themselves Beyond Us
• How the Soul Expends Its Passions Upon False Objects, When the True Are Missed.
• Whether the Governor of a Place Besieged Ought to Go Out to Parley
• The Hour of Parley Dangerous.
• That the Intention Is Judge of Our Actions.
• Of Idleness
• Of Liars.
• Of Quick Or Slow Speech
• Of Prognostications
• Of Constancy
• Ceremony of the Interview of Kings.
• Men Are Punished For Being Obstinate In the Defence of a Fort Without Reason.
• Of the Punishment of Cowardice
• A Trait of Some Ambassadors.
• Of Fear
• That We Are Not to Judge of Our Hour Till After Death.
• That to Philosophise Is to Learn to Die.
• Of the Force of Imagination
• The Profit of One Man Is the Loss of Another.
• Of Custom, and of Not Changing a Received Law

OF IDLENESS

AS WE see some grounds that have long lain idle and untilled, when grown rich and fertile by rest, to abound with and spend their virtue in the product of innumerable sorts of weeds and wild herbs that are unprofitable, and that to make them perform their true office, we are to cultivate and prepare them for such seeds as are proper for our service; and as we see women that, without knowledge of man, do sometimes of themselves bring forth inanimate and formless lumps of flesh, but that to cause a natural and perfect generation they are to be husbanded with another kind of seed: even so it is with minds, which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain them, run into a thousand extravagances, eternally roving here and there in the vague expanse of the imagination:—

—in which wild agitation there is no folly, nor idle fancy they do not light upon:—

The soul that has no established aim loses itself, for, as it is said:—

When I lately retired to my own house, with a resolution, as much as possibly I could, to avoid all manner of concern in affairs, and to spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live, I fancied I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do, as being by time become more settled and mature; but I find:—

that, quite contrary, it is like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to, and creates me so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself.