"The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death"

This quote by Michel de Montaigne talks to the inherent fragility and fleetingness of human life. We invest our entire presence working towards something, whether it be monetary stability, career success, or individual satisfaction, but eventually our supreme end is death. Montaigne is suggesting that regardless of our efforts to produce a life of convenience and security, we are all working towards the same inevitability. The idea of "developing your home of death" is a metaphor for the work we perform in our lives, the effort we put in to develop something that will ultimately fall apart and fade away when we pass away. It works as a pointer that life is valuable and fleeting, and encourages us to concentrate on what really matters in the restricted time we have.