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How to Live
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How to Live (2010) (edit title/settings)

A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

'a lively, well researched account of the man' --Literary Review `cleverly retells <Montaigne's> life... she conjures up 16th century France in all its tumultuous glory.' --Waterstone's Books Quarterly '... It's a rare achievement. Sarah Bakewell deserves congratulations for opening... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience - but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.”
  • “Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers- who frequently read each other as well as the original. Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how "minds are threaded together- how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides... It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind." This capacity for living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history is what makes a book like the 'Essays' a true classic. As it is reborn differently in each mind, it also brings those minds togheter."”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • “How does one achieve peace of mind?” On the latter point, Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it.
    Highlighted by 328 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 248 Kindle customers
  • “Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!”
    Highlighted by 242 Kindle customers
  • If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off—though I don’t know.
    Highlighted by 225 Kindle customers
  • Learning how to die was learning to let go; learning to live was learning to hang on.
    Highlighted by 224 Kindle customers
  • Life is what happens while you’re making other plans, they said; so philosophy must guide your attention repeatedly back to the place where it belongs—here.
    Highlighted by 222 Kindle customers
  • “Forget much of what you learn” and “Be slow-witted” became two of Montaigne’s best answers to the question of how to live. They freed him to think wisely rather than glibly; they allowed him to avoid the fanatical notions and foolish deceptions that ensnared other people; and they let him follow his own thoughts wherever they led—which was all he really wanted to do.
    Highlighted by 201 Kindle customers
  • “Let us cut loose from all the ties that bind us to others; let us win from ourselves the power to live really alone and to live that way at our ease.”
    Highlighted by 194 Kindle customers
  • In dying, he now realized, you do not encounter death at all, for you are gone before it gets there. You die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away. If other people try to pull you back, you hear their voices on “the edges of the soul.” Your existence is attached by a thread; it rests only on the tip of your lips, as he put it. Dying is not an action that can be prepared for. It is an aimless reverie.
    Highlighted by 176 Kindle customers
  • If you fail to grasp life, it will elude you. If you do grasp it, it will elude you anyway. So you must follow it—and “you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow.” The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything.
    Highlighted by 165 Kindle customers
Show all 12 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

The twenty-first century is full of people who are full of themselves.

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in Library Journal's Top Ten 2010. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Sarah Bakewell (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Country: English
Publication Date: 2010
ISBN: 9780701178925
Page Count: 387

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history

   
  • The Complete Essays of Montaigne

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history

   
  • Metamorphoses
  • Selected Letters
  • Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (The Anti-Dictator)
  • Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4)
  • Plutarch's Lives, Volume 2 (Modern Library Classics)
  • Discourse on Method
  • Pensees
  • The Confessions
  • Emile
  • Supplement Au Voyage de Bougainville (French Edition)
  • Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals
  • Island
  • The Journey Not the Arrival Matters
  • The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1: 1915-1919
  • Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot
  • The Gay Science
  • Daybreak
  • The World of Yesterday
  • The Discovery of Slowness
  • Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
  • Letters on England
  • Montaigne

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