Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96) was a French writer and one of the great moralists of French classicism. His only work, Les Caractères (1688,) encapsulates the psychological, social, and moral character of the French society of his time.
Not much is known about La Bruyère’s life. Born in Paris, he studied law at Orléans. He became one of the tutors to the Duke de Bourbon, grandson of the Prince de Condé, and remained in the Condé household as a librarian at Chantilly. He never married and died poor.
Les Caractères, fully Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec les caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle, (1688; The Characters of Theophrastus, Translated from the Greek, with the Characters or Manners of This Century, 1699,) comprises a treatise on the natural philosopher Theophrastus and La Bruyère’s translation of Theophrastus. It is then followed by 420 of La Bruyère’s reflections on the manners of his time.
Les Caractères portrays contemporary French dignitaries with masked names and unmasks the vanity and corruption of human behavior by satirizing Parisian society. Les Caractères was a particular favorite of David Hume and was widely admired by such writers as Gustave Flaubert, André Gide, and Marcel Proust.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jean de La Bruyere
One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Storytelling
A vain man finds it wise to speak good or ill of himself; a modest man does not talk of himself.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Humility, Modesty
With virtue, capacity, and good conduct, one still can be insupportable. The manners, which are neglected as small things, are often those which decide men for or against you. A slight attention to them would have prevented their ill judgments.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Manners
The generality of men expend the early part of their lives in contributing to render the latter part miserable.
—Jean de La Bruyere
At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Love
A vain man finds his account in speaking good or evil of himself.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Vanity
It is a sad thing when men have neither the wit to speak well, nor judgment to hold their tongues.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Wit, Talking
A man can keep a secret better than his own. A woman her own better than others.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Secrets
There are three stages in a person’s life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Life, Living
It is easier to enrich ourselves with a thousand virtues, than to correct ourselves of a single fault.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Reform, Virtue
How happy the station which every moment furnishes opportunities of doing good to thousands!—How dangerous that which every moment exposes to the injuring of millions.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: The Future, Goodness, Future
You think a man to be your dupe.—If he pretends to be so, who is the greatest dupe—he or you?
—Jean de La Bruyere
For man there are only three important events: birth, life and death; but he is unaware of being born, he suffers when he dies, and he forgets to live.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Life
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 Bruyere
Topics: Confidence
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.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Dogs
The sweetest of all sounds is that of the voice of the woman we love.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Conversation
Criticism is as often a trade as a science; requiring more health than wit, more labor than capacity, more practice than genius.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Criticism
Marriage, it seems, confines every man to his proper rank.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Marriage
A handsome woman who has the qualities of an agreeable man is the most delicious society in the world. She unites the merit of both sexes. Caprice is in the women the antidote to beauty.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Woman
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.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Goodness
Out of difficulties grow miracles.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Miracles, Difficulty
He is rich whose income is more than his expenses; and he is poor whose expenses exceed his income.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Riches, Poverty
We seldom repent of speaking little, very often of speaking too much; a vulgar and trite maxim, which all the world knows, but which all the world does not practise.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Speech
Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Time, Carpe-diem, Value of Time, Time Management, Brevity
Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Past and Present
It is hard for a haughty man ever to forgive one that has caught him in a fault, and whom he knows has reason to complain of him: his resentment never subsides till he has regained the advantage he has lost, and found means to make the other do him equal wrong.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Forgiveness
Politeness makes one appear outwardly as they should be within.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Manners
The most delicate, the most sensible of all pleasures, consists in promoting the pleasure of others.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Pleasure
It’s motive alone that gives character to the actions of men.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Character, Action
Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Grieving, Grief
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