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It is a fool's privilege to laugh at an intelligent man.

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
Fool
Laughing
Men
Privilege
Laugh
Intelligent

More quotes by Jean de la Bruyere

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Courtly manners are contagious they are caught at Versailles.
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Mockery is often the result of a poverty of wit.
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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
Jean de la Bruyere
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Intelligence is to genius as the whole is in proportion to its part. [Fr., Entre esprit et talent il y a la proportion du tout a sa partie.]
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We must strive to make ourselves really worthy of some employment. We need pay no attention to anything else the rest is the business of others.
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One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.
Jean de la Bruyere
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Let us not envy some men their accumulated riches their burden would be too heavy for us we could not sacrifice, as they do, health, quiet, honor and conscience, to obtain them: It is to pay so dear from them that the bargain is a loss.
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A man may have intelligence enough to excel in a particular thing and lecture on it, and yet not have sense enough to know he ought to be silent on some other subject of which he has but a slight knowledge if such an illustrious man ventures beyond the bounds of his capacity, he loses his way and talks like a fool.
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We are more sociable, and get on better with people by the heart than the intellect.
Jean de la Bruyere
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There are some men who turn a deaf ear to reason and good advice, and willfully go wrong for fear of being controlled.
Jean de la Bruyere
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A faithless woman, if known to be such by the person concerned, is but faithless if she is believed faithful, she is treacherous.
Jean de la Bruyere
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Genius and great abilities are often wanting sometimes, only opportunities. Some deserve praise for what they have done others for what they would have done.
Jean de la Bruyere
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Children are contemptuous, haughty, irritable, envious, sneaky, selfish, lazy, flighty, timid, liars and hypocrites, quick to laugh and cry, extreme in expressing joy and sorrow, especially about trifles, they'll do anything to avoid pain but they enjoy inflicting it: little men already.
Jean de la Bruyere
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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
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For some people, speaking and giving offence are one and the same thing. They are spiteful and bitter their style is infused with gall and wormwood mockery, abuse and insults flow from their lips like spittle.
Jean de la Bruyere
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Rarely do they appear great before their valets. [Fr., Rarement ils sont grands vis-a-vis de leur valets-de-chambre.]
Jean de la Bruyere
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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.
Jean de la Bruyere
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All confidence placed in another is dangerous if it is not perfect, for on almost all occasions we ought to tell everything or to conceal everything. We have already told too much of our secret, if one single circumstance is to be kept back.
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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.
Jean de la Bruyere
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A man is thirty years old before he has any settled thoughts of his fortune it is not completed before fifty. He falls to building in his old age, and dies by the time his house is in a condition to be painted and glazed.
Jean de la Bruyere