Jean de La Bruyere (1645 – 1696)
French essayist and moralist.
Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.
One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.
A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.
No man is so perfect, so necessary to his friends, as to give them no cause to miss him less.
Sudden love takes the longest time to be cured.
What a vast advantage has a speech over a written composition. Men are imposed upon by voice and gesture, and by all that is conducive to enhance the performance. Any little prepossession in favor of the speaker raises their admiration, and then they do their best to comprehend him; they commend his performance before he has begun, but they soon fall off asleep, doze all the time he is preaching, and only wake to applaud him. An author has no such passionate admirers; his works are read at leisure in the country or in the solitude of the study; no public meetings are held to applaud him.... However excellent his book may be, it is read with the intention of finding it but middling; it is perused, discussed, and compared to other works; a book is not composed of transient sounds lost in the air and forgotten; what is printed remains.
Liberality consists less in giving a great deal than in gifts well timed.
You may drive a dog off the King's armchair, and it will climb into the preacher's pulpit; he views the world unmoved, unembarrassed, unabashed.
Outward simplicity befits ordinary men, like a garment made to measure for them; but it serves as an adornment to those who have filled their lives with great deeds: they might be compared to some beauty carelessly dressed and thereby all the more attractive.
False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.
It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not.
Let us not envy a certain class of men for their enormous riches; they have paid such an equivalent for them that it would not suit us; they have given for them their peace of mind, their health, their honour, and their conscience; this is rather too dear, and there is nothing to be made out of such a bargain.
We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.
Between good sense and good taste there lies the difference between a cause and its effect.
We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.
La vie est une tragédie pour celui qui sent, et une comédie pour celui qui pense.
Lofty posts make great men greater still, and small men much smaller.
That man is good who does good to others; if he suffers on account of the good he does, he is very good; if he suffers at the hands of those to whom he has done good, then his goodness is so great that it could be enhanced only by greater sufferings; and if he should die at their hands, his virtue can go no further: it is heroic, it is perfect.
As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.
Women run to extremes; they are either better or worse than men.