Daily Inspiration Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Love, for Montaigne, refuses the courtroom. “If you press me” frames the whole line as a cross-examination: the world demanding reasons, evidence, tidy causes. His answer is a deliberate anticlimax. No virtues are listed, no romantic biography offered, no moral lesson extracted. Just identity, doubled back on itself: “because he was he, and I was I.” The phrasing is almost tautological, but the tautology is the point. It blocks the impulse to turn affection into a résumé item or a philosophical proof.

The context matters. Montaigne is writing out of a Renaissance culture that prized classification and explanation, even for private life. In the Essays, he keeps insisting that the self is slippery, contingent, and not fully knowable - especially not by abstract systems. This line, famously tied to his bond with Etienne de La Boetie, treats friendship as something that happens at the level of irreducible personhood. The “he” and “I” aren’t interchangeable roles; they’re singular constellations. Love is presented not as a response to qualities (beauty, wit, loyalty) but as an encounter between two particularities that happen to fit.

Subtext: Montaigne is protecting the relationship from instrumental logic. If he gives reasons, the love becomes conditional, negotiable, something that could be replicated if you found another man with the same traits. By refusing reasons, he’s claiming a kind of existential fidelity: the attachment is not about what the other provides, but about who each is, inescapably. It’s also a quiet rebuke to a culture that wants every intimacy to be legible, defensible, and useful. Montaigne makes it private without making it sentimental.