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The finest and most beautiful ideas on morals and manners have been swept away before our times, and nothing is left for us but to glean after the ancients and the ablest amongst the moderns.

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
Ideas
Morals
Nothing
Finest
Manners
Ablest
Moral
Glean
Times
Moderns
Left
Ancients
Away
Swept
Beautiful
Amongst

More quotes by Jean de la Bruyere

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Love seizes us suddenly, without giving warning, and our disposition or our weakness favors the surprise one look, one glance, from the fair fixes and determines us.
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.
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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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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.]
Jean de la Bruyere
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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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We wish to constitute all the happiness, or, if that cannot be, the misery of the one we love.
Jean de la Bruyere
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It seems to me that the spirit of politeness is a certain attention in causing that, by our words and by our manners, others may be content with us and with themselves.
Jean de la Bruyere
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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 Bruyere
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The events we most desire do not happen or, if they do, it is neither in the time nor in the circumstances when they would have given us extreme pleasure.
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.
Jean de la Bruyere
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It would be a kind of ferocity to reject indifferently all sorts of praise. One should be glad to have that which comes from good men who praise in sincerity things that are really praiseworthy.
Jean de la Bruyere
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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.
Jean de la Bruyere
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There is a false modesty, which is vanity a false glory, which is levity a false grandeur, which is meanness a false virtue, which is hypocrisy, and a false wisdom, which is prudery.
Jean de la Bruyere
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Let us not complain against men because otheir rudeness, their ingratitude, their injustice, their arrogance, their love oself, their forgetfulness oothers. They are so made. Such is their nature.
Jean de la Bruyere
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The generality of men expend the early part of their lives in contributing to render the latter part miserable.
Jean de la Bruyere
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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
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Extremes are vicious, and proceed from men compensation is just, and proceeds from God.
Jean de la Bruyere
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The beginning and the end of love are both marked by embarrassment when the two find themselves alone. [Fr., Le commencement et le declin de l'amour se font sentir par l'embarras ou l'on est de se trouver seuls.]
Jean de la Bruyere
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Women become attached to men by the intimacies they grant them men are cured of their love by the same intimacies.
Jean de la Bruyere
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Favor exalts a man above his equals, but his dismissal from that favor places him below them.
Jean de la Bruyere