Jean de la Bruyere
Jean de la Bruyere
Jean de La Bruyèrewas a French philosopher and moralist...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
CountryFrance
art logic convincing
Logic is the art of convincing us some truth.
ambitious french-philosopher man masters people useful
A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering his position.
french-philosopher man miss necessary
No man is so perfect, so necessary to his friends, as to give them no cause to miss him less.
belief discovers french-writer god
The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.
fear laugh laughed
We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.
children happens neither nor seldom thus
Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us.
atheist kings men
A pious man is one who would be an atheist if the king were.
world fame pursuit
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.
challenges cost birth
High birth is a gift of fortune which should never challenge esteem towards those who receive it, since it costs them neither study nor labor.
men rude proud
It is more or less rude to scorn indiscriminately all kinds of praise; we ought to be proud of that which comes from honest men, who praise sincerely those things in us which are really commendable.
duty grain obliged
Duty is what goes most against the grain, because in doing that we do only what we are strictly obliged to, and are seldom much praised for it.
time years months
Days, months, years fly away, and irrecoverably sink in the abyss of time.
pain attitude glasses
Some young people do not sufficiently understand the advantages of natural charms, and how much they would gain by trusting to them entirely. They weaken these gifts of heaven, so rare and fragile, by affected manners and an awkward imitation. Their tones and their gait are borrowed; they study their attitudes before the glass until they have lost all trace of natural manner, and, with all their pains, they please but little.
hero valet
Rarely do they appear great before their valets. [Fr., Rarement ils sont grands vis-a-vis de leur valets-de-chambre.]