Art & Creativity Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne slips a knife into the Renaissance obsession with mastery. "My trade and art is to live" sounds modest, almost shrugging, but it’s a provocation: he treats existence not as raw material for achievements but as the one craft worthy of lifelong practice. Trade implies livelihood, the daily grind; art implies finesse, taste, and deliberate form. Put together, they collapse the usual hierarchy that ranks “real work” above the messy business of being a person. The line quietly argues that living isn’t a default setting. It’s a discipline.

The intent is defensive and insurgent at once. In an era that prized public virtue, scholarship, and religious certainty, Montaigne makes a case for the private self as a legitimate subject of study. He isn’t selling escapism; he’s insisting that self-scrutiny is a moral technology. The subtext: systems that demand you be exemplary, productive, or pious will always underrate the harder task of staying sane, humane, and supple amid contingency. By naming living as “trade,” he also admits its costs - fatigue, contradiction, changing opinions - the stuff formal philosophy often edits out.

Context matters. Writing the Essays after retreating to his tower and after personal and civic upheavals (illness, grief, France’s Wars of Religion), Montaigne builds a philosophy that distrusts grand doctrines and prefers the granular evidence of one life observed honestly. The sentence works because it’s both credo and method: if life is the art, the essay is the workshop, and uncertainty is part of the apprenticeship.