French philosopher and moralist (1645-1696)
It is often easier as well as more advantageous to conform ourselves to other men's opinions than to bring them over to ours.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
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"Of Society and of Conversation", Les Caractères
If life be wretched, it is hard to bear it; if it be happy, it is horrible to lose it ; both come to the same thing.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
The critics, or those who, thinking themselves so, decide deliberately and decisively about all public representations, group and divide themselves into different parties, each of whom admires a certain poem or a certain music and damns all others, urged on by a wholly different motive than public interest or justice. The ardour with which they defend their prejudices damages the opposite party as well as their own set. These men discourage poets and musicians by a thousand contradictions, and delay the progress of arts and sciences, by depriving them of the advantages to be obtained by that emulation and freedom which many excellent masters, each in their own way and according to their own genius, might display in the execution of some very fine works.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
The pleasure of criticism takes away from us the pleasure of being deeply moved by very fine things.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
Nothing makes us better understand what trifling things Providence thinks He bestows on men in granting them wealth, money, dignities, and other advantages, than the manner in which they are distributed and the kind of men who have the largest share.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Gifts of Fortune", Les Caractères
The lives of heroes have enriched history, and history has adorned the actions of heroes ; and thus I cannot say whether the historians are more indebted to those who provided them with such noble materials, or those great men to their historians.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
No vice exists which does not pretend to be more or less like some virtue, and which does not take advantage of this assumed resemblance.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
I am not astonished that men who lean, as it were, on an atom, should stumble at the smallest efforts they make for discovering the truth ; that, being so short-sighted, they do not reach beyond the heavens and the stars, to contemplate God Himself.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Freethinkers", Les Caractères
It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
All the worth of some people lies in their name; upon a closer inspection it dwindles to nothing, but from a distance it deceives us.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Personal Merit", Les Caractères
The sweetest music is the sound of the voice of the woman we love.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Women", Les Caractères
Women are at little trouble to express what they do not feel; but men are still at less to express what they do feel.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Women", Les Caractères
A great mind is above insults, injustice, grief, and raillery, and would be invulnerable were it not open to compassion.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères
Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
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 BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
It is a sad thing when men have neither enough intelligence to speak well nor enough sense to hold their tongues.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Society and of Conversation", Les Caractères
Love begins with love ; and the warmest friendship cannot change even to the coldest love.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
Death happens but once, yet we feel it every moment of our lives; it is worse to dread it than to suffer it.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Mankind", Les Caractères