As Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out. The only one who can keep you mindful of this is you. - Sarah Bakewell

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.

From now on, Montaigne would live for himself rather than for duty.

The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called Montaigne a writer who put “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”