Jean Bruyere Quotes (31 Quotes)

A show of a certain amount of honesty is in any profession or business the surest way of growing rich

Making books is a skilled trade, like making clocks.

The punishment of a criminal is an example to the rabble but every decent man is concerned if an innocent person is condemned.

The duty of a judge is to administer justice, but his practice is to delay it

Hatred is so lasting and stubborn, that reconciliation on a sickbed certainly forebodes death

Mockery is often the result of a poverty of wit.

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.

A person's worth in this world is estimated according to the value they put on themselves.

Criticism is often not a science it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Outward simplicity befits ordinary men, like a garment made to measure for them but it serves as an adornment to those who have filled their lives with great deeds they might be compared to some beauty carelessly dressed and thereby all the more attractive.

There are few finer excesses in the world than an excess of gratitude.

Nothing more clearly shows how little God esteems his gift to men of wealth, money, position and other worldly goods, than the way he distributes these, and the sort of men who are most amply provided with them.

No more we meet in yonder bowers Absence has made me prone to roving But older, firmer hearts than ours, Have found monotony in loving.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

The same vices that are gross and insupportable in others we do not notice in ourselves

Modesty is to merit, as shades to figures in a picture, giving it strength and beauty.

One should never risk a joke, even of the mildest and most unexceptional charters, except among people of culture and wit.

It is a great misfortune not to possess sufficient wit to speak well, nor sufficient judgment to keep silent

We hope to grow old, and we dread old age that is to say, we love life and flee from death

There is as much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it

There is a report that Piso is dead it is a great loss he was an honest man, who deserved to live longer he was intelligent and agreeable, resolute and courageous, to be depended upon, generous and faithful.' Add 'provided he is really dead'.

A coxcomb is one whom simpletons believe to be a man of merit.

The noblest deeds are well enough set forth in simple language emphasis spoils them

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

Between genius and talent there is the proportion of the whole to its part

The spendthrift robs his heirs the miser robs himself.

From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants they are the whole of their race.

False greatness is unsociable and remote conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

The majority of men devote the greater part of their lives to making their remaining years unhappy.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

We are valued in this world at the rate we desire to be valued.