On marriage (Montaigne)
October 13th, 2006 | Published in Relationships, Quotes
The fact that we see so few good marriages is a sign of its price and its value. If you form it well and take it rightly, there is no finer relationship in our society. We cannot do without it, and yet we go about debasing it. The result is what is observed about cages: the birds outside despair of getting in, and those inside are equally anxious to get out. Socrates, when asked which was preferable, to take or not to take a wife, said: “Whichever a man does, he will repent of it.”
–Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Some Verses of Virgil” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 69