Jean De La Bruyere
23 quotations
Two persons cannot long be friends if they cannot forgive each other's little failings.
Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.
Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.
Jesting is often only indigence of intellect.
We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.
All men's misfortunes spring from their hatred of being alone.
We can recognize the dawn and the decline of love by the uneasiness we feel when alone together.
One seeks to make the loved one entirely happy, or, if that cannot be, entirely wretched.
Marriage, it seems, confines every man to his proper rank.
A vain man finds it wise to speak good or ill of himself; a modest man does not talk of himself.
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.
A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.
Lofty posts make great men greater still, and small men much smaller.
This great misfortune -- to be incapable of solitude.
One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.
It's motive alone which gives character to the actions of men.
The giving is the hardest part; what does it cost to add a smile?
Between good sense and good taste there lies the difference between a cause and its effect.
The sweetest of all sounds is that of the voice of the woman we love.
A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be thought.
Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.
No man is so perfect, so necessary to his friends, as to give them no cause to miss him less.