Jean de La Bruyere (1645 – 1696)
French essayist and moralist.
It is a sad thing when men have neither the wit to speak well, nor the judgment to hold their tongues.
Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.
Tout est dit, et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes qui pensent.
Women run to extremes; they are either better or worse than men.
As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.
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.
Lofty posts make great men greater still, and small men much smaller.
La vie est une tragédie pour celui qui sent, et une comédie pour celui qui pense.
We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.
Between good sense and good taste there lies the difference between a cause and its effect.
We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.
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.
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.
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.
A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.
One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.
No man is so perfect, so necessary to his friends, as to give them no cause to miss him less.
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
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.
Sudden love takes the longest time to be cured.