Quote

Outward simplicity befits ordinary men, like a garment made to measure for them but it serves as an adornment to those who have filled their lives with great deeds: they might be compared to some beauty carelessly dressed and thereby all the more attractive.

Jean de la Bruyere

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Jean de la Bruyere
Age: 50 †
Born: 1645
Born: August 16
Died: 1696
Died: May 10
Aphorist
Essayist
French Moralist
Lawyer
Philosopher
Translator
Writer
Paris
France
Jean de La Bruyere
Might
Attractive
Adornment
Great
Simplicity
Garment
Measure
Garments
Made
Deeds
Thereby
Men
Filled
Outward
Like
Ordinary
Serves
Beauty
Dressed
Befits
Lives
Compared
Carelessly

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It is better to expose ourselves to ingratitude than to neglect our duty to the distressed.
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It is the glory and merit of some men to write well and of others not to write at all.
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A position of eminence makes a great person greater and a small person less.
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When a work lifts your spirits and inspires bold and noble thoughts in you, do not look for any other standard to judge by: the work is good, the product of a master craftsman.
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If some persons died, and others did not die, death would be a terrible affliction.
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I am not surprised that there are gambling houses, like so many snares laid for human avarice like abysses where many a man's money is engulfed and swallowed up without any hope of return like frightful rocks against which the gamblers are thrown and perish.
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If women were by nature what they make themselves by art if they were to lose suddenly all the freshness of their complexion, and their faces to become as fiery and as leaden as they make them with the red and the paint they besmear themselves with, they would consider themselves the most wretched creatures on earth.
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A long disease seems to be a halting place between life and death, that death itself may be a comfort to those who die and to those who are left behind.
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We seldom repent of speaking little, very often of speaking too much: a vulgar and trite maxim, which all the world knows and, but which all the world does not practice
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Both as to high and low indifferently, men are prepossessed, charmed, fascinated by success successful crimes are praised very much like virtue itself, and good fortune is not far from occupying the place of the whole cycle of virtues. It must be an atrocious act, a base and hateful deed, which success would not be able to justify.
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We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.
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Most men spend the best part of their lives making the remaining part wretched.
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The generality of men expend the early part of their lives in contributing to render the latter part miserable.
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Misers are neither relations, nor friends, nor citizens, nor Christians, nor perhaps even human beings.
Jean de la Bruyere
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The Great slight the men of wit, who have nothing but wit the men of wit despise the Great, who have nothing but greatness the good man pities them both, if with greatness or wit they have not virtue.
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Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.
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Children have neither past nor future and that which seldom happens to us, they rejoice in the present. [Fr., Les enfants n'ont ni passe ni avenir et, ce qui ne nous arrive guere, ils jouissent du present.]
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Caprice in women often infringes upon the rules of decency.
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If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is the father.
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There are only three events in a man's life birth, life, and death he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.
Jean de la Bruyere