What Montaigne actually wrote about belonging to yourself

The version you’ve probably seen

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”

The wording of a modern translation; it’s the same sentence. Cotton’s older English, above, puts it as knowing that you are your own.

In plain words

Montaigne is writing about stepping back from public life, but the point travels: you can love people, work and things, as long as your happiness doesn’t hang entirely on them. Keep a room at the back of yourself, his “backshop”, that belongs to you alone, where you can be good company to yourself. For a restless mind it reads less like a call to leave everything and more like a reminder that there is somewhere inside to go back to.

Sit with this line → A few quiet exchanges about what it stirs in you.

Worth knowing

Pascal read Montaigne closely and often argued with him; the Pensées name him more than eighty times, and one note says, “It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.” Montaigne’s backshop and Pascal’s room are near neighbours. Chapter numbers in Book I differ between editions.