Faith & Spirit Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne is pulling off a sly reversal: love, usually blamed for making people stupid, is recast as the one force sharp enough to correct our vision. "Gave eyes" suggests an organ you didn't have before, not a mood swing. In his world, perception is the whole battleground. The Essays are basically a long argument that the self is slippery, that custom bullies us into certainty, and that our confidence is often just habit in a fancy coat. Love, here, becomes a counter-habit: it rearranges what counts as real.

The line "things are not as they seem" reads like a standard warning until the second sentence detonates it. Montaigne doesn't merely say love distorts reality; he says it can expose reality as already distorted. The everyday world - status, routine, public sense-making - is demoted to "the dream", a shared hallucination you inherit from society. The lover's "dream", meanwhile, is framed as real life: an interior truth with higher authority than consensus.

There's bite in that, and not just romantic bite. It's a Renaissance mind testing the limits of religious dogma, inherited philosophy, and political volatility. When public life is noisy with orthodoxy and violence, private experience starts to look less like escapism and more like evidence. Montaigne's subtext isn't "follow your heart"; it's "interrogate the so-called real". Love isn't a Hallmark glow here - it's epistemology, a radical tool for seeing how flimsy our "wakefulness" can be.