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Great things astonish us, and small dishearten us. Custom makes both familiar.

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
Great
Things
Astonish
Custom
Customs
Familiar
Small
Makes

More quotes by 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.
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A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.
Jean de la Bruyere
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Life is a kind of sleep: old men sleep longest, nor begin to wake but when they are to die.
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An egotist will always speak of himself, either in praise or in censure, but a modest man ever shuns making himself the subject of his conversation.
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He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.
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The most exquisite pleasure is giving pleasure to others.
Jean de la Bruyere
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The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.
Jean de la Bruyere
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The doctors allow one to die, the charlatans kill.
Jean de la Bruyere
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We should only endeavour to think and speak correctly ourselves, without wishing to bring others over to our taste and opinions.
Jean de la Bruyere
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The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discloses to me His existence. [Fr., L'impossibilite ou je suis de prouver que Dieu n'est pas, me decouvre son existence.]
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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
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We dread old age, which are not sure of being able to attain. [Fr., L'on craint la vieillesse, que l'on n'est pas sur de pouvoir atteindre.]
Jean de la Bruyere
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Foolish jokers are thick on the ground, and it rains insects of that sort everywhere. A good joker is a rarity even a man who is such by nature finds it hard to sustain the part for long it seldom happens that the man who makes us laugh wins our esteem.
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 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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Languages are the keys of science.
Jean de la Bruyere
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There is no employment in the world so laborious as that of making to one's self a great name life ends before one has scarcely made the first rough draught of his work.
Jean de la Bruyere
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If a handsome woman allows that another woman is beautiful, we may safely conclude she excels her.
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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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