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We ought not to make those people our enemies who might have become our friends, if we had only known them better.

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
Better
Might
Make
Enemies
People
Ought
Enemy
Friends
Known
Become

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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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If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is the father.
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Friendship * * * is a long time in forming, it is of slow growth, through many trials and months of familiarity.
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It is boorish to live ungraciously: the giving is the hardest part what does it cost to add a smile?
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Everything has been said, and we have come too late, now that men have been living and thinking for seven thousand years and more.
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It takes talent to please the people in a sermon by a flowery style, a cheerful ethic, brilliant sallies and lively descriptions but such a talent is inadequate. A better sort of talent neglects these extraneous ornaments, unworthy to be used in the service of the Gospel: such a preacher's sermon will be simple, strong and Christian.
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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.
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An assembly of the states, a court of justice, shows nothing so serious and grave as a table of gamesters playing very high a melancholy solicitude clouds their looks envy and rancor agitate their minds while the meeting lasts, without regard to friendship, alliances, birth or distinctions.
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I am told so many ill things of a man, and I see so few in him, that I begin to suspect he has a real but troublesome merit, as being likely to eclipse that of others.
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Cunning is none of the best nor worst qualities it floats between virtue and vice there is scarce any exigence where it may not, and perhaps ought not to be supplied by prudence.
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The best way to get on in the world is to make people believe it's to their advantage to help you.
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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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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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Most men spend the first half of their lives making the second half miserable.
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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.
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All of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone.
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It is worse to apprehend than to suffer.
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Misers are neither relations, nor friends, nor citizens, nor Christians, nor perhaps even human beings.
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A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen.
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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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