The only thing which consoles for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves and which makes us imperceptibly ruin ourselves.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

Description of man: dependence, longing for independence, need.

The man who knows God but does not know his own misery, becomes proud. The man who knows his own misery but does not know God, ends in despair...the knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course because in him we find both God and our own misery. Jesus Christ is therefore a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.

There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present.

All of our miseries prove our greatness. They are the miseries of a dethroned monarch.

It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.