Jean de La Bruyère Quotes

We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.

Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir etre seul.

Everything has been said, and we are more than seven thousand years of human thought too late.

Out of difficulties, grow miracles

Les douleurs muettes et stupides sont hors d'usage: on pleure, on récite, on répète, on est si touchée de la mort de son mari, qu'on n'en oublie pas la moindre circonstance.

No man is so perfect, so necessary to his friends, as to give them no cause to miss him less.

A man is rich whose income is larger than his expenses, and he is poor if his expenses are greater than his income.

L'amour qui naît subitement est le plus long à guérir.

«Сладострастие – это изъян сердца или, быть может, натуры; кокетство – порок души. Сладострастница внушает страх, кокетка – ненависть. Если оба эти свойства объединяются в одной женщине, получается характер, наигнуснейший из возможных.»

Жан де Лабрюйер «Характеры или нравы нынешнего века»

Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.

When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.

There are but three events in a man's life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.

Rien ne fait mieux comprendre le peu de chose que Dieu croit donner aux hommes, en leur abandonnant les richesses, l'argent, les grands établissements et les autres biens, que la dispensation qu'il en fait, et le genre d'hommes qui en sont le mieux pourvus.

One seeks to make the loved one entirely happy, or, if that cannot be, entirely wretched.