1645-1696, French Writer
A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Bachelor]
A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Praise]
A man can keep a secret better than his own. A woman her own better than others.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Secrets]
A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be thought.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Wish and Wishing]
A person's worth in this world is estimated according to the value they put on themselves.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Self-esteem]
A position of eminence makes a great person greater and a small person less.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Greatness]
A slave has but one master. An ambition man, has as many as there are people who helped him get his fortune.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Ambition]
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 – [Modesty]
All men's misfortunes spring from their hatred of being alone.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Loneliness]
All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Unhappiness]
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 – [Difficulties]
As long as men are liable to die and are desirous to live, a physician will be made fun of, but he will be well paid.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Physicians]
At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Love]
Avoid lawsuits beyond all things; they pervert your conscience, impair your health, and dissipate your property.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Law and Lawyers]
Between good sense and good taste there lies the difference between a cause and its effect.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Taste]
Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Children]
Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present — which seldom happens to us.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Present]
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 – [Critics and Criticism]
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 Bruyere – [Originality]
False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.
Jean De La Bruyere – [Greatness]