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.
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We are more sociable, and get on better with people by the heart than the intellect.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Society
They that have lived a single day have lived an age.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Living, Life
Let us not envy some men their accumulated riches; their burden would be too heavy for us; we could not sacrifice, as they do, health, quiet, honor, and conscience, to obtain them: it is to pay so dear for them that the bargain is a loss.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Riches, Wealth
As riches and favor forsake a man, we discover him to be a fool but nobody could find it out in his prosperity.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Riches, Prosperity, Wealth
We should keep silent about those in power; to speak well of them almost implies flattery; to speak ill of them while they are alive is dangerous, and when they are dead is cowardly.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Power
There is nothing keeps longer than a middling fortune, and nothing melts away sooner than a great one. Poverty treads on the heels of great and unexpected riches.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Poverty, Living, Courage
There are only two ways of getting on in the world; by one’s own industry, or by the stupidity of others.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Getting Ahead, Work, Ambition
The pleasure of criticism takes from us that of being deeply moved by very beautiful things.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Critics, Criticism
Talent, taste, wit, good sense are very different things but by no means incompatible. Between good sense and good taste there exists the same difference as between cause and effect, and between wit and talent there is the same proportion as between a whole and its parts.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Style, Taste, Intelligence
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: Living, Life
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
If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose. So the one is pretty equal to the other.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Life and Living, Life
We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Acting As If, Happiness, Laughter
One seeks to make the loved one entirely happy, or, if that cannot be, entirely wretched.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Lovers, Love
There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honors too distant to the man who prepares himself for them with patience.
—Jean de La Bruyere
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
Out of difficulties grow miracles.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Difficulty, Miracles
Every man is valued in this world as he shows by his conduct that he wishes to be valued.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Appreciation, Values, Man
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.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Critics, Criticism, Art
When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Reading, Books
As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.
—Jean de La Bruyere
Topics: Difficulty, Difficulties
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