Daily Inspiration Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne doesn’t accuse greed of being merely ugly; he frames it as the operating system of moral collapse. Calling covetousness "the devil's alphabet" is a sly Renaissance move: sin as literacy, vice as the grammar you learn first and keep using until death. The metaphor does two jobs at once. It gives greed a structural role (the alphabet is the base code for everything written) and a pedagogical one (you’re taught it early, almost as if corruption is a curriculum).

The line’s real bite is in its timeline: "the first vice... that moves, and the last which dies". Montaigne is less interested in sensational wrongdoing than in the engine that animates it. Covetousness is the impulse that gets the body in motion - the itch that turns appetite into strategy, desire into accounting. He implies that other vices are accessories; greed is the ignition. It also lingers because it can disguise itself as prudence, ambition, even responsibility. Lust burns out; anger exhausts itself; vanity needs an audience. Covetousness can age gracefully, presenting as "security" and "legacy" while quietly tightening its grip.

Context matters: Montaigne writes from a France battered by religious wars, where lofty moral rhetoric constantly masked material stakes - land, offices, inheritances. His skepticism about human virtue isn’t theatrical cynicism; it’s an inventory taken during crisis. The subtext is unnerving: if greed is both first cause and last survivor, then reform is not about one bad habit. It’s about relearning the alphabet.