Of Idleness
Original title: De l’oisiveté (French)
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
Translated by Charles Cotton; revised by William Carew Hazlitt (1630–1687; 1834–1913), 1877
1580; translated 1685–86, revised 1877

Cold Library · Open Stacks · S-005010 · https://coldlibrary.com/s/005010
Rights: First published in French in 1580. Charles Cotton’s translation appeared in 1685–86 and he died in 1687; William Carew Hazlitt, who revised it for the 1877 edition, died in 1913. Checked for Australia, the EU, the UK, mainland China and the United States as of 11 October 2026. Guidance, not legal advice.
Source: Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3600/pg3600.txt (retrieved 2026-10-11)
Generated 2026-10-14 from https://coldlibrary.com/en/open-stacks/montaigne-of-idleness

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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—

“Sicut aqua tremulum labris ubi lumen ahenis, / Sole repercussum, aut radiantis imagine lunae, / Omnia pervolitat late loca; jamque sub auras / Erigitur, summique ferit laquearia tecti.”

(“As when in brazen vats of water the trembling beams of light, reflected from the sun, or from the image of the radiant moon, swiftly float over every place around, and now are darted up on high, and strike the ceilings of the upmost roof.”— AEneid, viii. 22.)

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

“Velut aegri somnia, vanae / Finguntur species.”

(“As a sick man’s dreams, creating vain phantasms.”— Hor., De Arte Poetica, 7.)

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

“Quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat.”

(“He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere.”—Martial, vii. 73.)

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—

“Variam semper dant otia mentem,”

(“Leisure ever creates varied thought.”—Lucan, iv. 704)

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 chimaeras 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.