Michel de Montaigne Death Quotations

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it.

Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.

Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it.

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

To philosophize is to learn to die.

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

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.

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?

One should always have one's boots on and be ready to leave.

Of all the benefits which virtue confers on us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest.

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.

One should be ever booted and spurred and ready to depart.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.

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.

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.

To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death.

Like a full-fed guest, depart to rest ...

No man dies before his hour. The time you leave behind was no more yours, than that which was before your birth, and concerneth you no more.

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

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

It is equally pointless to weep because we won't be alive a hundred years from now as that we were not here a hundred years ago.