Quotes By Jean De La Bruyere

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Time makes friendship stronger, but love weaker.

No man is so perfect, so necessary to his friends, as to give them no cause to miss him less.

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.

Two quite opposite qualities equally bias our minds - habits and novelty.

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

The first day one is a guest, the second a burden, and the third a pest.

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.

The wise person often shuns society for fear of being bored.

This great misfortune - to be incapable of solitude.

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

As favor and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.

Men blush less for their crimes than for their weaknesses and vanity.

The sweetest of all sounds is that of the voice of the woman we love.

If some persons died, and others did not die, death would be a terrible affliction.

Logic is the technique by which we add conviction to truth.

The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.

We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.