Top 300 Jean de La Bruyère Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “No man is so perfect, so necessary to his friends as to give them no cause to miss him less.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

52. “Everything has been said, and we have come too late, now that men have been living and thinking for seven thousand years and more.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

53. “There are only two ways by which to rise in this world, either by one’s own industry or by the stupidity of others.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

54. “The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

55. “There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet’s bombast!”

— Jean de La Bruyère

56. “People reveal their character even in the simplest things they do. Fools do not enter a room, nor leave it, nor sit down, nor rise, nor are they silent, nor do they stand up, like people of sense and understanding.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

57. “Caprice in woman is the antidote to beauty.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

58. “Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

59. “Men fall from great fortune because of the same shortcomings that led to their rise.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

60. “There are some who speak one moment before they think.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

61. “There are certain people who so ardently and passionately desire a thing, that from dread of losing it they leave nothing undone to make them lose it.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

62. “The very essence of politeness seems to be to take care that by our words and actions we make other people pleased with us as well as with themselves.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

63. “There is nothing men are so anxious to keep, and yet are so careless about, as life.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

64. “When a plain-looking woman is loved, it is certain to be very passionately ; for either her influence on her lover is irresistible, or she has some secret and more irresistible charms than those of beauty.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

65. “The reason that women do not love one another is – men.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

66. “A man’s worth is estimated in this world according to his conduct.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

67. “You think him to be your dupe; if he feigns to be so who is the greater dupe, he or you?”

— Jean de La Bruyère

68. “Love and friendship exclude each other.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

69. “False glory is the rock of vanity; it seduces men to affect esteem by things which they indeed possess, but which are frivolous, and which for a man to value himself on would be a scandalous error.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

70. “Languages are no more than the keys of Sciences. He who despises one, slights the other.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

71. “I take sanctuary in an honest mediocrity.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

72. “The punishment of a criminal is an example to the rabble; but every decent man is concerned if an innocent person is condemned.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

73. “We should only endeavour to think and speak correctly ourselves, without wishing to bring others over to our taste and opinions.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

74. “We hope to grow old and we dread old age; that is to say, we love life and we flee from death.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

75. “Life at court does not satisfy a man, but it keeps him from being satisfied with anything else.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

76. “It is because of men that women dislike one another.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

77. “There are but three events which concern man: birth, life and death. They are unconscious of their birth, they suffer when they die, and they neglect to live.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

78. “They who, without any previous knowledge of us, think amiss of us, do us no harm; they attack not us, but the phantom of their own imagination.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

79. “The sublime only paints the true, and that too in noble objects; it paints it in all its phases, its cause and its effect; it is the most worthy expression or image of this truth. Ordinary minds cannot find out the exact expression, and use synonymes.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

80. “Anything is a temptation to those who dread it.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

81. “The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images; we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

82. “Caprice in women often infringes upon the rules of decency.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

83. “Envy and hatred go together. Mutually strengthened by the fact pursue the same object.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

84. “The same common sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

85. “Genius and great abilities are often wanting; sometimes, only opportunities. Some deserve praise for what they have done; others for what they would have done.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

86. “To what excesses do men rush for the sake of religion, of whose truth they are so little persuaded, and to whose precepts they pay so little regard!”

— Jean de La Bruyère

87. “Great things only require to be simply told, for they are spoiled by emphasis; but little things should be clothed in lofty language, as they are only kept up by expression, tone of voice, and style of delivery.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

88. “He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

89. “Avoid making yourself the subject of conversation.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

90. “To delay is injustice.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

91. “There are few wives so perfect as not to give their husbands at least once a day good reason to repent of ever having married, or at least of envying those who are unmarried.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

92. “The mind, like all other things, will become impaired, the sciences are its food, – they nourish, but at the same time they consume it.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

93. “The greatest part of mankind employ their first years to make their last miserable.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

94. “An inconstant woman is one who is no longer in love; a false woman is one who is already in love with another person; a fickle woman is she who neither knows whom she loves nor whether she loves or not; and the indifferent woman, one who does not love at all.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

95. “Sudden love is latest cured.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

96. “Tyranny has no need of arts or sciences, for its policy, which is very shallow and without any refinement, only consists in shedding blood.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

97. “Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

98. “A faithless woman, if known to be such by the person concerned, is but faithless ; if she is believed faithful, she is treacherous.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

99. “A woman with eyes only for one person, or with eyes always averted from him, creates exactly the same impression.”

— Jean de La Bruyère

100. “A lovely countenance is the fairest of all sights, and the sweetest harmony is the sound of the voice of her whom we love.”

— Jean de La Bruyère