less to you, what does it matter to you to have lost it? wherefore do you still desire it?
Cur amplius addere quæris
Rursum quod pereat male, et ingratum occidat omne?[1]
(c) Life is in itself neither good nor evil: it is the seat of good and evil according as you dispose it.[2] (a) And if you have lived one day, you have seen every thing: one day is equal to all days. There is no other light, there is no other darkness. This sun, this moon, these stars, the whole disposition of the heavens is the same which your ancestors enjoyed and which will be unchanged for your distant descendants.
(c) Non alium videre patres; aliumve nepotes
Aspicient.[3]
(a) And, at the utmost, the division and variety of all the acts of my comedy are completed in a year. If you have taken heed to the movement of my four seasons, they embrace the childhood, the youth, the manhood, and the old age of the earth. It has played its game; it knows no other trick than to begin again; it will be always the same: —
(a) I have no intention of manufacturing new pastimes for you.
Nam tibi præterea quod machiner, inveniamque
Quod placeat, nihil est; eadem sunt omnia semper.[6]
Give place to others as others have done to you.
- ↑ Why desire to add to the length of that which will again come to an evil end and will altogether perish unavailingly? — Lucretius, III, 941.
- ↑ See Seneca, Epistle 99.
- ↑ Your fathers saw no other things, nor will your sons behold anything different. — Manilius, I, 522. Montaigne took this quotation from Vivès’s Commentary on St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, XI, 4.
- ↑ We turn, ever enclosed in the same circle. — Lucretius, III, 1080.
- ↑ And the year returns, circling in its own track. — Virgil, Georgics, II, 402.
- ↑ For there is nothing else that I can devise or find that can please you: all things are the same always. — Lucretius, III, 944.
