Michel de Montaigne

“If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.”

“The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.”

“A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.”

“We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.”

“There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge.”

“Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.”

“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”

“Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.”

“Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.”

“If you don't know how to die, don't worry Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you don't bother your head about it.”

“Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.”

“For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.”

“I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.”

“I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.”

“I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.”

“Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.”