Marriage Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne’s line lands like a dinner-table joke with a philosopher’s knife hidden inside. “Blind” and “deaf” aren’t romantic ideals; they’re survival strategies. The wit is that the “good marriage” he proposes is built not on perfect understanding but on selective unknowing: she doesn’t see his flaws, he doesn’t hear her complaints. It’s cynicism dressed as practical advice, and the punchline doubles as a diagnosis of domestic life as a constant negotiation with disappointment.

The subtext is less “marriage is terrible” than “intimacy is intolerably detailed.” In Montaigne’s essays, the self is messy, inconsistent, embarrassingly human. Put two selves in a room long enough and the friction becomes the point. His quip suggests that harmony often requires editing reality, turning down the volume on one another’s daily irritations. That’s not quite love, but it may be companionship’s most common technology: strategic obliviousness.

Context matters: Montaigne writes in a 16th-century world where marriage is frequently an arrangement, not a soulmate project, and where gender roles are rigid enough to make the joke asymmetrical. The wife “blind” reads as indulgent tolerance; the husband “deaf” reads as habitual dismissal. The humor works because it admits, slyly, what social etiquette forbids saying outright: many marriages run less on mutual revelation than on mutual amnesty. The line survives because it still stings in an age that promises radical honesty and then quietly rewards people who know when not to listen.