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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.
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
May
Qualities
Best
Vices
None
Supplied
Perhaps
Floats
Ought
Scarce
Virtue
Prudence
Worst
Cunning
Quality
Vice
More quotes by Jean de la Bruyere
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
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
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
The State not seldom tolerates a comparatively great evil to keep out millions of lesser ills and inconveniences which otherwise would be inevitable and without remedy.
Jean de la Bruyere
Making a book is a craft, like making a clock it needs more than native wit to be an author.
Jean de la Bruyere
It is virtue which should determine us in the choice of our friends, without inquiring into their good or evil fortune.
Jean de la Bruyere
The passion of hatred is so long lived and so obstinate a malady that the surest sign of death in a sick person is their desire for reconciliation.
Jean de la Bruyere
A man of variable mind is not one man, but several men in one he multiplies himself as often as he changes his taste and manners he is not this minute what he was the last, and will not be the next what he is now he is his own successor.
Jean de la Bruyere
The best way to get on in the world is to make people believe it's to their advantage to help you.
Jean de la Bruyere
Laziness begat wearisomeness, and this put men in quest of diversions, play and company, on which however it is a constant attendant he who works hard, has enough to do with himself otherwise.
Jean de la Bruyere
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.
Jean de la Bruyere
When a man puts on a Character he is a stranger to, there's as much difference between what he appears, and what he is really in himself, as there is between a VIzor and a Face.
Jean de la Bruyere
Amongst such as out of cunning hear all and talk little, be sure to talk less or if you must talk, say little.
Jean de la Bruyere
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.
Jean de la Bruyere
A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen.
Jean de la Bruyere
The fool only is troublesome. A plan of sense perceives when he is agreeable or tiresome he disappears the very minute before he would have been thought to have stayed too long.
Jean de la Bruyere
Death happens but once, yet we feel it every moment of our lives it is worse to dread it than to suffer it.
Jean de la Bruyere
A man who is free and unmarried, if he has some intelligence, can rise above his fortune, mingle in society and meet the best people on an equal footing. This is harder for a married man: marriage, it seems, confines every man to his proper rank.
Jean de la Bruyere
Friendship * * * is a long time in forming, it is of slow growth, through many trials and months of familiarity.
Jean de la Bruyere
The opposite of what is noised about concerning men and things is often the truth. [Fr., Le contraire des bruits qui courent des affaires ou des personnes est souvent la verite.]
Jean de la Bruyere
