Time & Perspective Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Yesterday's certainty is today's bedtime story: Montaigne compresses an entire worldview into that sly pivot from "articles of faith" to "fables". The line works because it refuses to mock belief from the outside; it stages the betrayal from within. We recognize the feeling of having defended something with the heat of devotion, only to watch time cool it into narrative - something told, not lived. "Held" is physical, possessive. "Tell" is social, performative. Belief becomes literature.

Montaigne is writing in a 16th-century France racked by religious war and doctrinal bloodletting, where "faith" wasn't a private comfort but a public weapon. Against that backdrop, the sentence is a quiet act of resistance: skepticism as self-preservation. He doesn't claim to have escaped error; he includes himself ("we"), making fallibility the only shared creed worth trusting. That's the subtext: humility isn't virtue-signaling, it's a strategy for surviving a world that punishes doubt and sanctifies certainty.

The intent is less to debunk religion than to puncture the human habit of freezing temporary opinions into permanent identities. By calling yesterday's convictions "fables", he also hints at their narrative usefulness: fables teach, comfort, organize chaos. The danger is mistaking their utility for their truth. Montaigne's genius is that he makes epistemic modesty feel not like retreat, but like adulthood - the moment you realize your strongest beliefs will eventually sound, even to you, like something you once heard.