One Person’s Gain Is Another Person’s Loss
Translated by HyperEssays (2020–25)
Book 1 Chapter 21
Demades the Athenian condemned a man of his city who was making a living selling things needed for funerals, on the grounds that he wanted too much profit from it and that his profit could only come from the death of many. This verdict seems ill-conceived given that there is no profit that is not somebody else’s loss and that, by his reckoning, any kind of gain would have to be condemned.
The extravagance of youth only benefits the merchant; the high cost of grain, the farmer; the destruction of houses, the architect; and people’s lawsuits and arguments, officers of the law. The very status and the livelihood of religious authorities are derived from our deaths and our vices. As the ancient Greek comedy writer says, no doctor likes to see their friends in good health, nor soldiers peace in their city, and so on.1
Worse yet, let each one of us look inward and we will find that most of our inner wishes are born and grow at the expense of others.
And it occurred to me, as I was reflecting on this, that Nature does not belie her general policy in this, for natural philosophers affirm that the birth, nourishment, and growth of one thing is the decline and destruction of another.
Nam quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit,
Continuo hoc mors est illius, quod fuit ante.Whenever anything changes and escapes its bounds, at once it brings death to whatever was before.
Notes
- 1The Greek playwright is Philemon. Montaigne would have had access to his works, most of which is lost, through Joannes Stobaeus’s anthology, Florilegium, translated by Conrad Gessner in 1543. ↩︎
Related documents
Metadata
- Updated
- July 9, 2026
- Translation
- HyperEssays
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
- Source
- Montaigne, Michel de. 1598. Essais. Edited by Marie de Gournay. Paris: Abel l’Angelier.
- Numbering
- HyperEssays follows the chapter sequence used by Marie de Gournay, Montaigne’s first posthumous editor, from 1595 onward. Some editions and translations use the older, 1580–1588 sequence and may refer to this chapter as chapter 22 instead of 21.
- Word Count
Eds Words 1580 239 1588 241 1595 240 Word count in French editions. - Comp. Date
- Probably 1572 · Composition dates are estimates based on Pierre Villey’s Les sources & l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne: Les sources & la chronologie des Essais. (Paris: Hachette, 1908).
- Alt. Titles
- That the Profit of one Man is the Inconvenience of another; One man’s profit is another man’s harm; One man’s profit is another man’s loss
How to cite this page
Montaigne, Michel de. (1595) 2026. “One Person’s Gain Is Another Person’s Loss.” Translated by HyperEssays. Hyper