Quotes By Jean De La Bruyere

The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

It is a sad thing when men have neither the wit to speak well nor the judgment to hold their tongues.

We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.

Love and friendship exclude each other.

One seeks to make the loved one entirely happy, or, if that cannot be, entirely wretched.

A mediocre mind thinks it writes divinely; a good mind thinks it writes reasonably.

Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us.

I would not like to see a person who is sober, moderate, chaste and just say that there is no God. They would speak disinterestedly at least, but such a person is not to be found.

We should laugh before being happy, for fear of dying without having laughed.

A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.

The regeneration of society is the regeneration of society by individual education.

We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment when alone together.

Out of difficulties grow miracles.

Two persons cannot long be friends if they cannot forgive each other's little failings.

The passion of hatred is so long lived and so obstinate a malady that the surest sign of death in a sick person is their desire for reconciliation.

One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.

A man can keep another's secret better than his own. A woman her own better than others.

It is boorish to live ungraciously: the giving is the hardest part; what does it cost to add a smile?

A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be thought.

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

He who tip-toes cannot stand; he who strides cannot walk.

All men's misfortunes spring from their hatred of being alone.

All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone.

Time makes friendship stronger, but love weaker.

Everything has been said, and we are more than seven thousand years of human thought too late.

There is not in the world so toilsome a trade as the pursuit of fame; life concludes before you have so much as sketched your work.

To be among people one loves, that's sufficient; to dream, to speak to them, to be silent among them, to think of indifferent things; but among them, everything is equal.

One must laugh before one is happy, or one may die without ever laughing at all.

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.